AQUA-FAANG RESULTS AND THEIR IMPACTS

Aqua-Faang results and their impacts. Moving towards precision breeding in European aquaculture.

By Professor Dan Macqueen and Professor Sigbjørn Lien.

The H2020 AQUA-FAANG project has generated extensive new functional genomics datasets in the six main finfish species farmed in European aquaculture. This article introduces these datasets, how they are being shared with the research and innovation community, and how AQUA-FAANG results provide valuable opportunities to develop precision breeding strategies to increase aquaculture sustainability and profitability.

The issue

Aquaculture is vital to European and global nutritional security, and this role becomes increasingly important with the continued trend of human population growth, driving greater demand for high-quality dietary protein, healthy fatty acids and micronutrients. Finfish farming faces many challenges to sustainable production and expansion, including the constant threat of infectious
diseases and climate change, which is enabling new pathogens to enter aquaculture systems while posing further issues to fish health and welfare.

Addressing such challenges requires a multi-pronged approach, with selective breeding providing a keystone strategy to ensure fish with the most desirable characteristics are farmed now and in the future

Genomics provides a vital toolbox for commercial breeding programmes in farmed animals. Selective breeding using genetic markers linked to traits (genomic selection – GS) is currently
widely used to farm fish with favourable characteristics, e.g. disease resistance.

While the current generation of selective breeding is effective when the animals are close relatives, it becomes less effective when animals are distantly related from different populations, or across generations. This is because the selection performed is not directly based on the underlying genetic variants causing the desired traits.

In fact, there are millions of genetic variants within any species, but most have zero effect on traits. If selective breeding involved targeting the much smaller number of genetic variants that truly influence favourable characteristics (causal variants), it would become highly effective in distantly related animals. This type of precision breeding would have a range of positive impacts that drive increased sustainability and profitability of the aquaculture sector. However, identifying causal variants is challenging and requires cutting-edge techniques.

Aqua-Faang contribution to solutions:

Aqua-Faang has produced extensive new datasets to identify regions of the genetic code (i.e. the genome sequence) that impact biological traits in the main finfish species farmed in European aquaculture.

We call these regions functional, and they include DNA elements that control how genes are expressed in different conditions, for example during development or following a challenge to the immune system. Genetic variants in such regions of the genome are much more likely to affect traits of importance to aquaculture than randomly selected variants.

AQUA-FAANG has produced extensive new datasets to identify regions of the genetic code (i.e. the genome sequence) that impact biological traits in the main finfish species farmed in European aquaculture.

The AQUA-FAANG project represents a great advancement because this type of data is extremely limited in farmed animals and its generation was a huge effort spanning several years, requiring collaboration by many partner organisations around Europe.

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