Abstract
One of the goals of the aquaculture industry is to understand and control growth associated traits through selective breeding. In the present study the molecular basis of growth heterogeneity in the European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) was addressed. To establish growth heterogeneity in a group of hatchery bred sea bass individuals were tagged and their specific growth rates (SGR) determined at monthly intervals. Gene expression in the brain, liver and white muscle from fish with the most divergent sustained SGR (6 individuals of the first and last quartile) was assessed using SuperSAGE (Serial Analysis Gene Expression) combined with next generation SOLiD4 sequencing. A total of approx. 11 million edited tags (26 bp), on average 2 million tags per SAGE library, that represented 47.071 unique transcripts were identified. Comparison of transcripts in fish with high and low SGR yielded 344, 698 and 601 differently expressed tags (0.01% false discovery rate and 4-fold change) in brain, liver and muscle, respectively. The tags were mapped onto the sea bass genome and approximately one third of the tags could be assigned to annotated genes. Pathway enrichment analysis revealed in liver, muscle and brain intricate gene expression changes in endocrine regulatory pathways involved in growth, metabolic and the stress axis, underlying divergent SGR in sea bass.
Highlights
The aquaculture industry has the same general aspirations as terrestrial production systems, which is to enhance economically important traits (Canario et al, 2008)
The present study has demonstrated the utility of high throughput methods for revealing transcriptional changes that underlie divergent growth phenotypes in the sea bass
The results suggested that changes in endocrine regulatory pathways involving the IGF, insulin and stress axis may be at the basis of the divergent growth observed in our study
Summary
The aquaculture industry has the same general aspirations as terrestrial production systems, which is to enhance economically important traits (Canario et al, 2008). With the more recent adoption of intensive aquaculture production systems, Southern European species lack large-scale formal selection programs to improve economically important traits. This is the case of the European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) with a production estimated at 126 thousand tonnes and a market value of 500 million Euros (FAO, 2012). This species has a molecular resource rich status and is a prime candidate for the development of a genetic selection program using molecular genetics (Canario et al, 2008). Additional resources include a >12 Â coverage BAC-library (Whitaker, McAndrew, & Taggart, 2006), a radiation hybrid map (Guyon et al, 2010), over 30,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) (Louro et al, 2010), an oligonucleotide microarray (Ferraresso et al, 2010) and a well assembled and annotated genome (Tine et al, 2014)
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