SalmoBreed boosts salmon sea lice resistance

NORWEGIAN genetics company SalmoBreed announced a breakthrough in the production of salmon that are more resistant to sea lice and pancreas disease (PD), reported FIS last month.

The Bergen based firm is confident its research will help the industry make significant savings.

The method, called genomic selection, enables the breeding values for selection of parent broodfish to be calculated using both phenotypic data and information from a large number of DNA markers.

‘We are quite proud of the fact that we succeeded in adopting genomic selection for two important traits in our breeding programme,’ said the firm’s CEO Jan-Emil Johannessen.

‘Our geneticists are very satisfied with the accuracy of the results that we achieved from this method, especially for sea lice resistance that has previously been based only on lice counting results done on family fish.’

He explained that their method provides increased genetic gain and reduced rate of inbreeding in species such as cattle, pigs and poultry.

Genetics and genomics manager Dr Borghild Hillestad said that in the case of PD and sea lice resistance, they use approximately 50,000 markers and that before this new programme was introduced they used family information from challenge tests in addition to QTL testing of candidates.

‘With genomic selection, we can select those individuals showing the highest resistance to sea lice within each separate family, and hence get a stronger assurance that the eggs we supply actually have the desired genetic value of the trait of interest,’ Hillestad said.

Johannessen said that by using this technique, they can select the best broodstock from all families and that way increase their genetic progress, reduce the rate of inbreeding and run a more sustainable breeding programme.

‘This is a breakthrough for our company, but also for the entire salmon industry, which will have the opportunity to make use of the results already from fry produced this autumn,’ he said.

SalmoBreed said its research was conducted in cooperation with Nofima and other partners in a Research Council of Norway innovation project called ‘Cost efficient implementation of genomic selection in Atlantic salmon breeding’.