In the morning of July 28, with invitation of the Dr. Zexia Gao of the College of Fisheries, Dr. Nicholas Robinson from Nofima Norwegian Institute visited the fisheries forum of our university. He gave an academic report entitled "Application of genomics for boosting disease resistance and stress resilience in fish and shellfish". This report was warmly welcomed by the teachers and students.
Dr. Nicholas started the report from the basic knowledge and development of aquaculture. He explained the background knowledge related to this research. Then, He introduced the application of genomics for improvement the disease resistance and stress resistance of fish and shellfish, taking the Luohu carp,Haliotis rubra andSalmo salar as examples.
After that, Dr. Nicholas applied the genetic map to analyze theAeromonas hydrophiladisease of luohu carp, aiming to breed highly anti-disease luohu carp varieties and to understand the role of genetic pathway in anti-infection and disease resistance mechanism. They used SNP makers to construct disease-related linkage maps and showed that some genome-wide linkage groups were associated with the resistance ofAeromonas hydrophila. In addition, some immune related genes such as perforin, MHC and mucin were closely linked to QTL. The genomic selection was found to be capable to improve the resistance of Luohu carp. Genomics-based studies of abalone mortality showed that gene expression associated with metabolic and immune processes is different in susceptible and easily recovered populations. The early developmental stress of theSalmo salar based on epigenetic editing, Dr. Nicholas’s group found that hypoxia stress during early development stages affected the regulation of hypoxia-responsive genes. Taken together, these results showed that the gene selection, gene editing and epigenetic editing have great application prospects in aquaculture.
In this report, Dr. Nicholas presented a wonderful report. After the report, Dr. Nicholas discussed and answered all the questions raised by the teachers and students, which achieved a great effect of academic communication.
Nicholas Robinson, who is a senior expert at the Nofima Norwegian Institute, researcher at the University of Melbourne's Aquaculture Enterprise, has 28 years’ experience in fish and shellfish genetic and breeding programme design, functional genomes and genome-wide breeding. He also served as Principal Investigator (PI) in genetics and breeding projects in Australia and Norway. He hosted more than 50 research projects from the European Union and the Norwegian Research Council and published more than 70 scientific papers.
Reviewer: Han Liu
Translator:Yuan Sun
