Mention krill, and whales might come to mind. The tiny shrimp-like crustaceans are the food of choice for whalesnutritionally dense, easily harvested and abundant.

Its those same qualities that make krill seem like a short-list candidate for the next big protein source to a pair of West Virginia University researchers.

Drs. Janet Tou and Jacek Jaczynski, assistant professors in WVU s Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences, have been collaborating with Taiwanese scholar Yi-Chen Chen on a study of the nutritional benefits of krill for human consumption.

It sounds offbeat, but the research is intriguing enough to have earned it the cover of a recent issue of Nutrition Reviewsthe leading resource among scientific journals providing state-of-the-art information on developments in nutrition, dietetics, food science and nutrition science policy.

According to Tou, the high-profile placement came as a bit of a surprise.

We were getting requests from people all over the U.S. and internationally to provide them with a copy of the paper,she said.We werent sure what was generating all this interest in krill, but we were happy that people were interested in finding out about it.

Given the abundance and nutritional potential of krill, perhaps the level of interest isnt so surprising.

The krill biomass potentially available for human food is comparable to the biomass of all of the other aquatic species currently harvested by humans,Tou said.

In addition, it has a composition that suggests it would be a nutritious food source for humans, he added. Yet it has been underutilized as a food source by humans and is relegated to whale food or used as feed for the farmed fishing industry.

Part of its underutilization, Tou said, was that krill has powerful digestive enzymes that upon demise cause the krill to spoils almost immediately, but the research team has developed a way around that.

Dr. Jaczynski developed a technique that can recover protein and oil before they are destroyed,he explained,so now we have a chance to isolate the protein and oils to test their nutritional value.

Results of their initial studies are promising.

We found that protein provided by krill is of high quality; that is, it meets the entire requirement for human adults for maintaining health and for the most part provided the protein needed to support growth in infants,Tou said.

As for the dreaded bad-fat factor that plagues some protein-rich foods, krill is low in fat, especially the unhealthy saturated fats, he noted.

Krill is also a rich source of the omega-3 fats that have been found to play a role in reducing the risk of heart disease.

Even better,How the omega-3 fats from krill are deposited in the body tissue has been suggested to actually make it more protective against heart disease than the omega-3 from fish,Tou added.

And theres very little waste from a krill harvest.

Even the outer skeleton that needs to be removed to get the protein can be used,Tou said.

The chitin associated with the exoskeleton has been used as a weight-loss product and the minerals recovered from the exoskeleton can be used as a calcium supplement.

Research on krill is just beginning so we are excited about all the possibilities,Tou said.