In a breakthrough for cod aquaculture, scientists from a consortium of Norwegian marine and aquaculture institutions on Thursday announced they generated the first-ever draft sequence and assembly of the Atlantic cod genome.
The researchers hope to use the new information and the fully annotated genome to identify genes and genetic variations underlying important traits for cod aquaculture.
The next step for the team is to continue to sequence the cod transcriptome and investigate specimens from various wild cod stocks.
“In these follow-up studies we will be searching for SNP and traits relevant to aquaculture, such as sexual maturity, temperature tolerance, oxygen uptake, as well as fishery related traits such as growth in response to harvesting,” said Kjetill Jakobson, consortium leader and professor at the University of Oslo. “Previous studies have shown that if the large cod are harvested from a population of fish, the subsequent offspring population tends to grow smaller. We plan to explore the genetic basis of this evolutionary response.”
The study was conducted using the Genome Sequences FLX System from 454 Life Sciences, a Roche subsidiary. It began in 2008 when the Norwegian Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis was awarded funding for the project.
