Genetically Engineered Seafood Coming To a Restaurant Near You

'The first genetically-modified animal for human consumption could be arriving in grocery stores across the United States as early as next year.' Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath tipped us off to Indiana Public Media's report on AquaBounty Technologies:
AquaBounty will produce a GMO salmon that CEO Ron Stotish says will grow faster than freshwater-raised fish. 'It does so because we've given it the ability, using the same biological process that regulates growth in the unmodified salmon, to grow about twice as fast reaching market rate about half the time,' Stotish says. The technology has been around since the 1990s, but it took until 2015 to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, due to concerns about people eating genetically-modified animals. The genetic makeup of the biotech fish takes a growth-hormone regulatory gene from the Pacific Chinook salmon with a promoter gene from an ocean pout and puts it into the genome of an Atlantic salmon. The result causes for the growth hormone to remain on leading to faster growth rate than non GMO salmon.
The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. 'We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water,' Stotish says. 'Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice.'

The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.