Month: June 2019

Fish from aquaculture is becoming more significant for human consumption. Demand of aquaculture products has steadily increased and global seafood consumption has doubled over the last 15 years. In European Union, per capita consumption reached 24.3 kg in 2016 (Eumofa 2018), but still only around 24% of consumption originates from aquaculture. The majority of Europeans (70%) eat fishery and aquaculture products at home regularly, at least once per month. Respondents …

Dr. Ashie Norris works as a group geneticist in Mowi. Mowi, previously known as Marine Harvest, operates in 14 countries and is the world’s largest salmon farming company with more than 14 500 employees. For Ashie, the company has been a place to work and develop professionally for 20 years. Young horse enthusiastic from Ireland’s midlands thought that horse breeding could be her calling. She studied genetics in Trinity College in …

Dr. Morten Rye is the Managing Director in Akvaforsk Genetics (AFGC) and the Director of Genetics in Benchmark Genetics, AFGC’s parent company.  Besides that he is a man who is passionate about aquaculture and has been so since the early days of his career as a scientist. In AquaIMPACT he is leading Work Package 3. “I’ve spent my entire professional career working with genetics in aquaculture. I studied animal genetics …

Akvaforsk Genetics, formally Akvaforsk Genetics Center (AFGC) and Mowi are both part of the AquaIMPACT consortium and working closely with genomic selection – one of the tools we see have significant impact in aquaculture industries today – and more so tomorrow. AquaIMPACT communication staff sat down to discuss with two key people, Morten Rye from Akvaforsk Genetics and Ashie Norris from Mowi. Click the links below and read about their …

WP1 Genomic Innovations: Enabling commercial-scale genomic selection Wageningen University. WP Leader: John Bastiaansen. Data collection in commercial environments is an important activity for the first year of WP1. Families have been produced for trout, salmon and parental fish have been selected to produce sea bass and sea bream families later this year. Many of these fish will be genotyped to show the impact and opportunities of genomic selection for health, …

AquaIMPACT has initiated interaction with the two of its sister projects funded from the same Horizon 2020 Innovation Action call ‘Sustainable European aquaculture 4.0: nutrition and breeding innovations.’ On October 9th 2019, the three initiatives are organising a joint session at Aquaculture Europe 2019 (AE2019) congress in Berlin to present their approaches and commonalities. See more: https://www.aquaeas.eu/uncategorised/402-welcome-to-aquaculture-europe-2019 The three consortiums are AquaIMPACT, FutureEUAqua and iFishIENCi. These projects complement each other …

AquaIMPACT objective: In AquaIMPACT, we develop economically sustainable, commercial-scale implementation of genomic selection for genetic improvement of Atlantic salmon, rainbow trout, gilthead seabream and European seabass in practical breeding programmes. Main impact: More effective breeding programmes that are able to improve especially fish traits related to resource efficiency, disease resistance, fish welfare and product quality. Current state: Genomic selection is already applied in terrestrial animals, such as dairy and beef …

Akvaforsk Genetics is a leading commercial provider of genetic improvement services to aquaculture industries worldwide, with extensive experience from design and operation large scale selection programs across Europe, Asia and the Americas. The company was established in the late ‘90s. Akvaforsk Genetics has designed or serviced cost effective selection programmes covering most major farmed aquaculture species including salmonids, seabream, seabass, turbot, Atlantic cod, tilapias, carps, and marine shrimp (L. vannamei, …