Know more

The Gènesea project, coordinated by François Allal, a research scientist at Ifremer (Marbec) is financed by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund as part of the "Fisheries and Aquaculture Innovation" programme.

The general objective of the Gènesea project is to develop tools and methods that allow genomic selection on disease resistance in the two main marine French Aquaculture species, the European sea bass and the Gilthead sea bream. The project includes sea bream genome sequencing (that of the sea bass already being available), and SNP markers in these two species in order to develop in each of these species a genotyping array that includes 55.000 to 60.000 markers. Animals challenged either with nodavirus or vibriosis (bass) or pasteurellosis (bream) from selection programmes by breeders or from experimental lines at Ifremer will be genotyped with arrays in order to describe the genetic architecture of resistance to these pathogens. From these results, operational tools (selection of a smaller panel of markers - less costly and pipelines for data treatment) will be developed in order to help establish genomic selection in French sea bass and sea bream selection companies.

This innovation is awaited by all the actors involved in aquaculture selective breeding since it is expected to produce important efficiency gains. Commercially speaking, in a context with growing competition, being the first to be able to claim the development of genomic selection, and notably on disease resistance which is identified as a major handicap by the actors of the Mediterranean sector, will be a major asset. In addition, these tools will also help research move quicker to understand the genetic architecture of traits and the evolution of genomes in a natural environment.