GIA 2011: Genomics in Aquaculture 2011 Symposium

Abstract

Genomics, although a relatively young branch of science, has had a tremendous scientific, social, and economic impact in the world. Aquaculture genomics research started around 15 years ago, but progress at the beginning was slow due to limited funding. However, this situation has been changing due to technological advances that are accessible to aquaculture researchers. Among many of the technological advances, the next-generation sequencing technologies have had the largest impact on aquaculture genomics. Nowadays the sequencing cost is dropping rapidly, enabling studies of structure, expression, and function of the entire genome in a wide variety of aquaculture species. Along with the major progress made in aquaculture genomics in the last several years, there are major challenges in dealing with the huge amount of data. Large datasets in multiples of terabytes themselves pose challenges in data processing, analysis, and storage. More importantly, how to draw biological information useful for aquaculture out of the huge datasets is a tremendous challenge. Facing such challenges, the series of the Genomics in Aquaculture (GIA) symposium was born. The first GIA symposium was held in 2009. This symposium was funded by the Research Council of Norway (refs. 192126 and 190350) and organized by the University of Nordland (Norway) in collaboration with the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (Heraklion, Greece) and the National Institute of Nutrition and Seafood Research (Norway). Its remarkable success and the E. Sarropoulou (*) Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture, Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, P.O. Box 2214, 71003 Heraklion, Greece e-mail: sarris@her.hcmr.gr