Prof. José Antonio Lupiáñez Cara, director of the Drugs, environmental toxics and cell metabolism research group, has been working for three years in trout growth manipulation. This researcher, together with eight more professors of the Universities of Jaén, Valencia and Barcelona, are feeding this kind of laboratory fishes on an inhibitor obtained from olive remains, “maslinic acid”, “multiplying by three the growth process with less than half the food”. In addition, fishes are “edible and the compound they are feeded with produces beneficial effects in their organism”.
This research, which offers on the one hand a solution for olive remains and on the other hand a cheap and healthy way to feed animals, had its origin in the work carried out by Prof. Andrés García Granados in using maslinic acid as a HIV inhibitor.
“In this case we were interested in cell growth, fishes were our biological source and we wanted to take part in the synthesis/degradation process that causes ageing and growth. Every manipulation causes problems (as corticoids in lamb, veal…) and we had to find something natural like this inhibitor extracted from olive tree”. The complementary feed researchers use to feed trouts is easy to obtain and cheap to produce”especially because the raw materia is for free and its use is beneficial for the environment. It will take two or three years to introduce the product into the market».
Apart from this use, maslinic acid is being investigated as a complementary treatment in diseases like colon cancer, HIV and premature ageing.
The University of Granada has patented two olive remain products: Oleanolic acid and maslinic acid; they both have been found in very high percentages, of about a 0.4% and 0.8% in dry olive remains respectively. Although both acids are of commercial interest, researchers have focused on the maslinic one for its biological properties.
The Drugs, environmental toxics and cell metabolism group is working in three lines:
– Regulation of the intermediary metabolism: Gluconeogenesis, amoniogenesis, ketogenesis and NADPH production systems.
– Protein spare: Characterization of fractional speeds of protein accumulation (kg), synthesis (ks) and degradation (kd).
– Evolution of intermediary metabolism and paleometabolism: Flow control, metabolic response time and molecular optimization theories.
Reference: José Antonio Lupiáñez Cara.
Dpt.of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Faculty of Sciences.
Phone number: 958 243089.
E-mail: jlcara@ugr.es
