A Review of some prebiotics and probiotics supplementation effects on farmed fishes: with special reference to Mannan oligosaccharides (MOS)

Abstract

Aquaculture has been increasingly contributing to animal protein production during the last few decades. Tilapia is known as one of the highly valuable fish cultured in wide geographical areas in several countries as a source of animal protein including Egypt. Tilapia has the merit of tolerance to a wide range of environmental conditions and ability to utilize food from the lowest trophic levels. The intensification of aquaculture production is usually challenged by infections including bacterial and parasitic burdens, which obligates the use of chemicals and antibiotics to control disease outbreaks. The injudicious use of antibiotics inevitably led to expansion of resistance, mutant pathogenic strains and detrimental effects to fish and consumer health.Therefore, it is imperative to find alternative ecofriendly sources as prebiotics and probiotics which can improve fish health, performance, and immunity without any side effects to the fish themselves or the consumer health. Prebiotics are known as a group of non-digestible food ingredients which encourage the growth of advantageous microorganisms in the gastro-intestinal tract. Like probiotics and synbiotics, inclusion of prebiotics as feed supplements into diets of farmed fishes is usually accompanied by immunomodulation and increased resistance of fish against serious bacterial agents as Aeromonas hydrophila infection. The current review article focuses on the potential effects of probiotics and MOS-containing prebiotics on health status, immune response and survivability of farmed fishes specially referring to Nile tilapia.Fish.