Salmon eggs with improved resistance to sea lice will be
made available for sale later this year by leading aquaculture firm Landcatch
in a major advance for the industry.
Landcatch and its scientific partners have applied a
technique known as genomic selection - a method of screening the DNA of
individual fish - to identify those that are most resistant to sea lice
infection, one of the biggest problems facing the aquaculture industry.
The company announced to the UK industry’s annual
conference Aquaculture UK in Aviemore that several million selected eggs will
be commercially available by December, in Landcatch’s next spawning, to improve
the resistance of the next generation of Atlantic salmon.
Landcatch, which has its headquarters in Ormsary in
Argyll, and a genetics team based in Stirling, is pioneering work in the
development of genetic and genomic selection tools for improving farmed salmon.
The latest development – another first for the Scottish
company - is seen as a significant step in a long road that aims to reduce sea
lice numbers to such an extent that they will no longer be a problem.
Dr Alan Tinch, director of genetics at Landcatch, told
delegates at the conference that the industry may never get to the stage where
farmed salmon are completely resistant to sea lice, but this development is a
major advance in tackling the issue.
He said: “We are excited to bring this advance in
technology to market and to take a step forward in reducing the impact of sea lice
on welfare and performance of salmon.”As part of a strategic initiative to improve robustness,
Landcatch was the first aquaculture company to pinpoint a QTL, or major gene,
controlling the resistance of salmon to Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis (IPN).
Sea lice resistance featured as high priority in this
strategy. The firm’s scientists also demonstrated that sea lice resistance is
inherited and can be predicted using DNA markers. The latest advance shows that sea lice resistance is
controlled by a handful of DNA regions with large effects, a hundred or so
regions with small effects and thousands of regions with very small effects.
The Landcatch team takes a small fin sample from each
fish and use a recently-developed SNP Chip to analyse more than 100,000
markers, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). These SNPs help
scientists locate genes associated with disease and, subsequently, predict the
sea lice resistance of individual fish to be used in breeding.
Dr Tinch added: “Salmon breeding takes a leap forward
with the successful implementation of genomic selection for sea lice
resistance. We now have a high
resolution digital quality image of the genetic value of each of our broodstock
and predict with high accuracy which males and females are the most resistant
to sea lice.”
Landcatch is part of Hendrix Genetics, the global,
multi-species animal breeding organisation.
Collaborators in the project are the universities of
Glasgow, Stirling and Edinburgh, (including The Roslin Institute and Edinburgh
Genomics) and Affymetrix UK Ltd. The work was funded by the UK’s innovation
agency, the Technology Strategy Board, and the Biotechnology and Biological
Sciences Research Council.
The Aquaculturists
This blog is maintained by The Aquaculturists staff and is supported by the magazine International Aquafeed which is published by Perendale Publishers Ltd.
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