On December 31, 2015, the Ministry of Agriculture officially issued a production application security certificate of the large yellow croaker antimicrobial peptide hepcidin to Xiamen University. To our knowledge, this is the first approved Production Application Security Certificate of the genetic engineering antimicrobial peptide of marine fish in China. This outstanding achievement was obtained by Professor Kejian Wang and his research group at the College of Ocean and Earth Science, Xiamen University. 

Antibiotic contamination and abuse is one of the biggest problem worldwide and also an annoying problem which severely affects the sustainable and healthy development of aquaculture industry and livestock and poultry breeding in China. The antimicrobial peptides are thought to be one of the most promising alternatives to antibiotics and could be expected as an effective substitute for antibiotics. Marine animals including fish, crabs, shrimps etc., are thought to be the larger sources of new antimicrobial peptides. The development and application of marine antimicrobial peptides not only has an important prospect on commercial usage such as additives in feedstuffs or food, pharmaceuticals or medicine usage etc., but also is important in aquaculture and livestock as substitutes to decrease the dosage of or disuse the antibiotics, which will lead to reduce the antibiotic contamination and maintain the marine animals healthy breeding.

Professor Wang’s group (wkjian@xmu.edu.) has been undertaking studies on isolation, identification and functional analyses of new antimicrobial peptides in marine animals since 2002. Many newly identified AMPs from marine animals in recent years have strong activities against various pathogenic microorganisms, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, fungi or even virus. They constructed highly effective prokaryotic and eukaryotic expression system after long-term trials and improvement of optimal expression conditions and a large amount of AMP products can be easily obtained for research and commercial use using the eukaryotic expression system. The recombinant products of AMPs with high activity against target pathogenic microorganisms were developed to be as feedstuff additives with the co-operative enterprise. The feedstuff with the AMP additive substituting for antibiotics was used for one-year pilot test and one-year environmental release test in the fish farming respectively for the purpose of safety evaluation on the genetic engineering antimicrobial peptide.  After several years of field tests in the fish farming, the tested genetic engineering antimicrobial peptides from marine animals including fish and crab are proved safe to the experimental fish. The Production Application Security Certificate of the genetic engineering antimicrobial peptide of marine fish has been approved by the Ministry of Agriculture, China, state clearly that this product of antimicrobial peptide is legal to be used in China and that will greatly be beneficial to the aquaculture industry, livestock breeding, and even probably for human being in future.