Ross houston roslin

Bron, W. Starkey, B. McAndrew, D. Verner-Jeffreys, R. Paley, G. Rimmer, I. From there, I started working more and more in aquaculture. How do you see the future of your research? I think the area that we are working in aquaculture genetics is becoming more important and is beginning to be seen as an important part of sustainable food production. Acceptance of the use of genetics as a solution to disease is increasing, therefore there is more research effort being put into this direction and companies are becoming more interested in applying selective breeding for disease resistance.

This is really exciting for the future of my research because I remember when disease resistance was not thought of as something related to selective breeding at all. It has only been in the past five, ten years where it has become a major part of what selective breeding is all about, at least in aquaculture species.

Why is disease resistance such an important trait in aquaculture? I think it is because diseases are a big problem in aquaculture, perhaps because there is less research into other potential control mechanisms like vaccinations or drug development.

Another reason may be that, in aquaculture, especially seawater aquaculture, fish and shellfish are very exposed to the environment around them. This makes it very difficult to contain diseases using biosecurity, which may be possible to do in other types of farming. A benefit of working on disease resistance is the knowledge that it benefits both the economy and animal welfare.

I can think of two challenges that immediately come to mind. The first is a technical challenge that luckily, currently affects me much less. For other livestock species, or a more researched fish like salmon, this may have been possible. Aquaculture species also tend to have a lot of wonderful and weird genomes, which are very complicated with many repeats and duplications, making research even harder.

One means to reducing genotyping cost is the use of genotype imputation, where selected key animals e. The main objectives of the current study were to assess the feasibility and accuracy of genotype imputation in the context of a salmon breeding program.

The specific aims were: i to measure the accuracy of genotype imputation using medium 25 K and high 78 K density mapped SNP panels, by masking varying proportions of the genotypes and assessing the correlation between the imputed genotypes and the true genotypes; and ii to assess the efficacy of imputed genotype data in genomic prediction of key performance traits sea lice resistance and body weight.

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