Vegetable lipid sources affect in vitro biosynthesis of triacylglycerols and phospholipids in the intestine of sea bream (Sparus aurata).

Despite the good growth performance of several fish species when dietary fish oil is partly replaced by vegetable oils, recent studies have reported several types of intestinal morphological alterations in cultured fish fed high contents of vegetable lipid sources. However, the physiological process implied in these morphological changes have not been clarified yet, since alterations in the physiological mechanisms involved in the different processes of lipid absorption could be responsible for such gut morphological features. The objective of the present study was to investigate the activities of reacylation pathways in fish, the glycerol-3-phosphate and the monoacylglycerol pathways, in order to clarify the intestinal triacylglycerol (TAG) and phospholipid biosynthesis to better understand the morphological alterations observed in the intestine of fish fed vegetable oils. Intestinal microsomes of sea bream fed different lipid sources (fish, soyabean and rapeseed oils) at three different inclusion levels were isolated and incubated with L-[(14)C(U)]glycerol-3-phosphate and [1-(14)C]palmitoyl CoA. The results showed that in this fish species the glycerol-3-phosphate pathway is mainly involved in phospholipid synthesis, whereas TAG synthesis is mainly mediated by the monoacylglycerol pathway. Feeding with rapeseed oil reduced the reacylation activity in both pathways, explaining the high accumulation of lipid droplets in the supranuclear portion of the intestinal epithelium, whereas soyabean oil enhanced phosphatidylcholine synthesis, being associated with the increase in VLDL found in previous studies.