BioProject

Aquaculture production is now nearly on par with wild capture output reaching 46% of the total fish industry yield in 2018. More...

Aquaculture production is now nearly on par with wild capture output reaching 46% of the total fish industry yield in 2018. Inland finfish production represented nearly 47 million tonnes in 2018, with the Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) being the third most important species, representing 8.3% of the global production. The success of the Nile tilapia is mainly due to active breeding programmes with a strong focus on improving growth rate and weight at maturity. There is now a strong incentive to better understand the genetic bases underlying those traits, but also to accelerate the improvement or integration of traits of increasing importance such as resistance to parasites and pathogens (e.g. Tilapia Lake Virus ), as well as temperature tolerance for instance. The availability of high quality genomic resources enable to speed up breeding traits of interest through the application of genomic selection through the identification and utilisation of genome wide marker information. The availability of an accurate genome assembly is key in those developments. The current reference genome for the Nile tilapia has been established from an XX homozygous clonal line which unfortunately does not share the evolutionary history of the major elite strains including both the GIFT and GIANT strains. As such recent work identified different genomic locations associated with sex determination loci between the reference strain (LG1 and GIFT LG23). Additionally, the report of introgression of O. aureus during the breeding process of the GIANT strain also indicate that the current reference genome might not be suitable and highlight the need for a high quality genome sequence and annotation to further enable breeding efforts. Here we report the completion of a high quality genome assembly and annotation for the GIANT strain. Less...