Genetic Rescue of 2001 Brood Year of the Heritage Atlantic Salmon Selective Breeding Program

Description

In another ACRDP-supported project, Heritage Salmon Ltd and DFO are developing a set of genetic markers that can be used to identify individual fish in the Atlantic salmon SBP to family and thus eliminate the need for freshwater rearing of fish in individual family tanks prior to tagging. The elimination of family tanks will result in reduced rearing costs and improvement of selection through the reduction of environmental variability among families. We have identified a suite of eight genetic loci that are highly informative for assignment of fish to family and are developing cost-effective methods for high-throughput analysis of the loci. Development of the new methodology (using capillary rather than gel-based DNA sequencers) is not complete but we estimate a cost reduction of at least 20% per fish.

Program Name

Aquaculture Collaborative Research and Development Program (ACRDP)

Year(s)

2005 - 2006

Ecoregion(s)

Pacific: Vancouver Island West Coast

Principal Investigator(s)

Ruth Withler
Email: WithlerR@pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca