Genetics and Genomics to Enhance the Welfare, Production Efficiency, and Disease Resistance of Farmed Fish and Shellfish Species

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapidly increasing human population, the demand for high-quality animal protein is expected to increase dramatically. Fish and shellfish are important sources of this protein for human food and nutritional security. With the declining catch from wild fisheries, aquaculture provides a sustainable and environmentally clean source of protein for this growing human population. Like the other agricultural productive sectors, aquaculture industries are facing several challenges, including the need for faster-growing, feed-efficient, disease-resistant, and climate-change-resilient strains. Selective breeding is a major strategy to improve traits that are characterized by diverse phenotypes and partly controlled by genetics. The currently available genetic and genomic tools are powerful tools that support selective breeding for different traits of interest for various aquaculture species. Additionally, genomics can also be utilized to assess and monitor genetic diversity and inbreeding levels in aquaculture populations, thus enabling breeders to maximize their diversity while minimizing inbreeding rates in the populations and limiting the potential negative influence of inbreeding depression in aquaculture populations.

The purpose of this issue is to demonstrate that the use of genetic or genomic tools can be useful to improve production efficiency and disease resistance in farmed fish and shellfish species. In this issue, we encourage the submission of papers covering the genetic characterization of traits such as the growth performance and disease resistance of fish and shellfish species, with a particular emphasis on identifying the genetic or genomic background of those important traits, detecting epigenomic signatures underlying phenotypic differences, and providing evidence of the application of genomic and genetic tools to evaluate and select candidate breeders.

Dr. Robert Mukiibi
Dr. Sara Faggion
Guest Editors

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• aquaculture genomics
• disease genomics
• genome-wide association studies
• genomic prediction
• aquaculture breeding
• population genomics
• transcriptomics
• epigenetics
• fish and shellfish