Genetic tinkering has resulted in fluorescent fish and a boost for Taiwan's ornamental fish dealers.
When Andrew Fang, vice president of the Taikong Group, looks at the tiny fish swimming in scores of tanks at the company's research center, he sees the endless possibilities of creation. "Each tank is a potential starting point of a great achievement," he says.
Indeed, the fish are not the natural inhabitants of rivers or seas, but creations of the laboratory. Each is genetically modified (GM) to improve its appeal in the ornamental fish market, and none is so hard to take the eyes off than the unearthly fluorescent fish. "They look so cool in dimly lit places like pubs," says Fang. The spectral creatures have certainly caused a stir. Time magazine placed fluorescent fish among the 40 coolest inventions of 2003 and the same year the world-renowned periodical Science and the Discovery Channel came to Taiwan to report on the story. The exciting new fish breed was later written into a textbook on biotechnology for American university students.
The Taikong Group hopes that the interest in the fluorescent fish leads to greater profits. Established in 1977, the company started out exporting aquarium fish to the world through Hong Kong. To enhance its competitive edge, Taikong set up an R&D department in 1996 to apply biotechnology to ornamental fish. The fish bank, where various GM fish strains are created, spawned the fluorescent fish a year later. The technology for the breakthrough was based on the research of Tsai Huai-jen, professor and director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at National Taiwan University (NTU). In 2001, Tsai announced that his experiments had created fluorescent fish, and Taikong saw the potential to sell them as aquarium fish. Taikong brought Tsai on board, and with his research the company has since bred 15 types of glowing fish, five of which are already on the market.
The spectral glow created by the genetic modification turns ordinary-looking Japanese medaka and zebra fish into something much more lively for the fish tank. Both of them have long been experimented on, and now they come in a glowing version. To render the change, scientists extract genes encoded with a fluorescent protein from jellyfish and corals and inject them into the fish embryos. The technique has been tried on other creatures in Taiwan as well. This year, NTU researchers succeeded in creating the world's first fluorescent pigs, a testimony to the strength of Taiwan's biotechnology sector and some of the weirder possibilities of science.
Scientists have been using fluorescent fish as research tools for some time. The glow of the fish is just bright enough for research work, but not bright enough for the fish to be used ornamentally. And scientists had not thought of commercializing the fish until Tsai began cooperating with Taikong, according to Chu Tah-wei, associate professor of aquaculture at National Kaohsiung Marine University. To date, only Singapore and Taiwan have made the genetically altered species available to consumers. "We already have a lot of GM plants on the market, but this is the first time bioengineered animals have been sold publicly in large quantities," says Chu. And Taiwan seems to be leading the way. Both countries, for example, raise zebra fish with luminous muscles, but only Taiwan has succeeded in making "all-bright" medaka fish with glowing matter in every cell.
The injection of luminous genes is just the initial step in breeding the fish. Researchers then have to wait until the fish mature, mate and propagate. If the offspring carry the same luminous genes as their parents, then the project is considered a success. According to Fang, the fish are then sterilized before they are sold. "We try our best to make the fish barren, although for some strains it proves impossible to achieve 100 percent sterility," he says.
The company sterilizes the fish for two reasons. First, not everyone is delighted by the thought of genetically altered glowing fish breeding outside of controlled environments. Taikong tries to ease concerns by selling fish that will not breed. Despite the sterilization treatments, there is still a chance that some fluorescent fish will propagate. Taikong also hopes to prevent breeding for commercial reasons, reserving the market potential for itself. The company has already applied for licensing and intellectual property rights in Taiwan and abroad for its GM products and the techniques that create them.
Currently sales of fluorescent fish account for 5 to 10 percent of the company's total revenue, and the figure rises to over 20 percent if the sales of peripheral products, such as the blue light used to intensify the glow of the fish, are included. The primary market for the inexpensive living curio is still domestic, but some exports flow to other Asian nations, in particular China and Malaysia. The United States and most European countries are still off-limits to the glowing fish because of reservations about GM animals.
Taikong is trying to overcome those jitters through scientific demonstrations of the safety of the fish. According to Fang, the strategy has already worked with South Korea, which once banned the fish from its markets. One of the chief concerns of the South Koreans and others who raise an eyebrow at genetic modification is the possible effect on the food chain. Would fish that eat glowing fish glow? Would people eventually glow if the genes worked their way up the food chain?
Taikong set out to calm nerves with science. To persuade the Koreans, Tsai conducted an experiment where a big fish was fed with nothing but the GM fish for six months and then dissected. No fluorescent protein was left in its body. "It's normal to get this result because protein can be digested. If you get the opposite result, you'd win a Nobel Prize," says Tsai. The Koreans finally relented, and in addition to sales in Korea, Taikong today collects royalties from Korean companies licensed to mass-produce the modified fish.
Fang believes that there is a growing acceptance of GM products in general. "Researchers took many protective measures, like doctors treating SARS, when they first conducted experiments on genetic modification, but they don't do so anymore," he says.
Nor is research on GM fish limited to techniques for inventing glowing ornamental fish. Researchers, for example, are assessing the feasibility of turning fluorescent fish into a tool for supervising water quality. They hope that some day fish will act as an indicator of water safety, with variations in the color and in the intensity of the glow of the fish indicating the level of water pollution. Cooperating with NTU, Academia Sinica and the National Taiwan Ocean University, Taikong invests about 5 percent of its revenue in R&D every year.
For now most research on ornamental fish is still focused on adding more luminescent fish to the aquariums of collectors. Under the auspices of Taikong and the National Science Council, a project is now being conducted by Tsai to produce a kind of larger-sized ornamental fish with a reddish glow. In fact, Taiwan has long been good at developing new species through crossbreeding. One example is the creation about 20 years ago of the blood parrot fish, a hybrid between two kinds of Latin American cichlids. The fish is still a popular export item shipped by local ornamental fish dealers. And after years of experiments, Taiwanese breeders managed to produce a variety of the discus fish that won the Best of Breed title at the biennial International Discus Championship in Germany in 2004. The hybrid was praised for its perfect size, color and shape.
"Taiwan boasts great technical expertise in cultivating fish even by international standards," says Chu. Crossbreeding is in fact a more traditional method for creating new strains, and he points out that Taiwan's expertise in the field owes much to the knowledge passed from father to son in the many family-owned ornamental fish farms in southern Taiwan. "When it comes to crossbreeding, they usually do a better job than people in academia," says Tsai. The combination of the traditional crossbreeding techniques of fish farmers and the advanced biotechnology experiments of scientists has been a winner for Taiwan's ornamental fish industry.
Demand, moreover, is consistently strong. According to Sharmon Chou, secretary-general of the ROC Aquarium Association, about one in eight households in Taiwan keeps fish. "Fish symbolize affluence in Chinese society, so people love to have them in their home or office," Chou says. The demand for ornamental fish alone is already encouraging for the industry, while the sales of tanks and other aquarium products create even more revenue. Approximately 60 percent of the value of the industry comes from the sales of supplies while the fish themselves account for the remaining 40 percent.
Worldwide, the ornamental fish industry is worth about US$5 billion annually. To promote Taiwan's aquarium fish abroad, the Council of Agriculture in 2001 helped found the Asia-Pacific Ornamental Fish Union, an international organization whose members are heads of major ornamental fish associations, such as the ROC Aquarium Association.
The group has assisted Taiwan's businesses in attending international aquarium fish exhibitions, where fluorescent fish have been an eye-opener, according to Chu Tah-wei, who also serves as the group's secretary-general. "We exchange information on R&D too," he says. "Taiwan outshines other countries especially in this respect."