Investigating Genetic Diversity and Genomic Signatures of Hatchery-Induced Evolution in Gilthead Seabream (Sparus aurata) Populations

2021 
The identification of the genetic basis of domestication in fish species is of timely importance for the aquaculture industry in order to increase productivity, quality, and the welfare of farmed fish. The goal of this study is to investigate the largely unknown aquaculture-induced evolution in gilthead seabream, which is one of the most important farmed fish in the Mediterranean region. We used a panel of 1159 genome-wide SNPs, and genotyped 956 fish from 23 wild populations of Mediterranean-wide distribution and 362 farmed fish from five Greek hatcheries. We assessed the genetic diversity of the sampled populations and contrasted the results of four different approaches of outlier detection methods. We recognized one very strong candidate and two good candidate SNPs with evidence for aquaculture-induced evolution in gilthead seabream. The annotation of these SNPs revealed neighboring genes with biological roles from stress tolerance and disease resistance to sexual maturation that may explain our observations. In conclusion, we demonstrate that the genome of gilthead seabream, despite the fact that the species is often suggested to be in the early stages of the domestication process, shows evidence of aquaculture-induced evolution. We report on a list of genes that may explain our observations and that may be investigated further. We anticipate that our findings will stimulate additional research with the use of SNP panels of higher density that can elucidate the genomic architecture of domestication in this species of high aquacultural interest.
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