About the project

The project is led by Senior Researcher Jacob Seilø Torgersen, Aquagen,

This project seeks to take advantage of natural resistance to sea lice in coho salmon and transfer the causative genes or expression responses to Atlantic salmon through use of gene editing. The development of a gene-edited, sea lice-resistant Atlantic salmon would have a huge impact on the industry. Bringing about a gene edited product is challenging but has huge potential in the realization of value creation.

Background

Sea lice infestation is a critical problem for animal welfare for the Norwegian salmon farming industry, holding back increased value creation and sustainability. Salmon breeding relies on trait heritability and more recently it has been shown that selection based on inheritance for lice resistance has little potential. For the salmon breeding industry, gene editing that produces resistant fish holds tremendous promise for bringing out novel products, but this approach faces a range of technological challenges.

Objectives

The main objective is to identify target genes that can be edited in Atlantic salmon to confer resistance to sea lice. By taking advantage of improved genome annotation, generation of a cross-species dataset to sea lice and a novel phenotype resembling responses to sea lice infestation, we can analyse high quality and reliable expression networks to narrow down the list of causative genes for gene editing. Further, a new in vitro model will be developed to validate gene function and rank target genes for in vivo testing. Finally, gain of function gene editing approaches must be optimized for efficacy and reduction of mosaicism.

The project's page at the Research Council of Norway

Participants

NMBU participants

External participants

• Aquagen, Senior Researcher Jacob Seilø Torgersen, Project Leader
  Norwegian Institute for Marine Research (IMR)