© Umami Bioworks
Umami Bioworks* has launched of the world’s first Virtual Marine Cell, a constraint-based metabolic model powered by augmented intelligence and machine learning that simulates the inner workings of aquatic species with unprecedented precision. This breakthrough aims to establish a new digital backbone for the global blue economy, enabling faster research and development, sharper predictions and radically reduced experimentation for aquaculture, cultivated seafood and marine bioactives.
The Virtual Marine Cell uses species-specific datasets from tuna, salmon, eel and other high-value organisms, to model how real cells grow, respond to nutrients, react to stress, produce critical compounds and transport them out of the cell. By learning directly from biological and environmental data, the platform replaces years of slow trial-and-error with instant predictive insights.
Enhancing aquaculture resilience
Aquaculture’s biggest bottlenecks like growth variability, disease, stress sensitivity, feed inefficiency and unstable yields all stem from cellular behaviour that has been historically difficult to measure. The Virtual Marine Cell enables researchers and producers to predict growth rates and optimise culture conditions, simulate disease and immune responses, improve feed and nutrient strategies, model stress tolerance and temperature sensitivity and identify genetic and metabolic markers tied to performance, stress or nutritional content. This means faster breeding programs, more resilient stock, and sharply reduced biological risk.
Accelerating bioactive discovery
Marine lipids, peptides, enzymes and bioactives power multibillion-dollar markets in skincare, nutrition, pharmaceuticals and wellness; yet, discovering them has traditionally been slow and costly. The Virtual Marine Cell enables rapid in-silico screening of bioactive secretion pathways, metabolic signatures and species-specific compounds with functional potency. Teams can now identify high-value marine molecules in days instead of years, and optimize their production using metabolic engineering without genetic modifications.
“Marine biology has never had a computational engine like this. The Virtual Marine Cell cuts through biological uncertainty and lets the industry move with software speed instead of lab-bench speed,” said Ashwath Bendre, product manager at Umami Bioworks, in a press release.
Umami Bioworks is already collaborating with leading global seafood, aquaculture, biotech, and consumer-goods companies to apply the Virtual Marine Cell to real-world challenges across production performance, resilience, and bioactive discovery.
*Umami Bioworks is one of Hatch Blue’s portfolio companies, but The Fish Site retains editorial independence.
