This time the focus for the newsletter is on genomic selection in aquaculture.

AquaIMPACT is a major effort to integrate the fields of fish breeding and nutrition to increase the competitiveness of EU’s aquaculture of Atlantic salmon, rainbow trout, gilthead sea bream and European sea bass, to ensure food and nutrition security, and to satisfy consumer demands for high-quality seafood with limited environmental impact.

During the last four years, AquaIMPACT has:

  • Demonstrated the success of commercial selective breeding programs in improving fish traits
  • Facilitated the implementation of genomic selection in breeding programmes, to take breeding programmes to the next level
  • Developed feeds and fish nutrition for the fish originating from breeding programmes
  • Developed smart software and automated phenotyping to improve cost-efficiency of breeding and feed development
  • Assessed consumer perception on these developed methods and aquaculture production methods in more general

The newsletter presents the way genomic evaluation for resistance against Flavobacterium columnare in rainbow trout was developed together with a company and research partners. The work has also a wider impact that is valid across species – how the cost of genomic evaluation can be reduced by optimising DNA marker panels or by smart computing methods.

Read more from the newsletter!

Or, if you need a playful approach…you may want to try the Aquakultor mobile game that demonstrates the use of selective breeding!

Antti Kause (Natural Resources Institute Finland, Luke), the AquaIMPACT coordinator