Mowi and Roslin Institute launch £8.5m project for better Scottish salmon
UK Government-funded programme seeks to improve resilience to disease and will focus on heart and gill health
Salmon farmer Mowi Scotland and Edinburgh University’s Roslin Institute have partnered for an £8.5 million, five-year research partnership to improve the welfare and productivity of farmed salmon.
Experts will seek to understand how to limit the impact of chronic complex diseases, enabling better health and welfare.
The team will use a range of approaches and technologies to improve resilience to disease throughout the salmon lifecycle, Roslin Institute explains in an article on the Edinburgh University website.
The scientific objectives outlined are highly strategically relevant and deliver immediate translational opportunities to salmon production
Mowi Scotland health, welfare and biology director Herve Migaud
Researchers will establish a world-leading framework to identify regions of the salmon genome associated with complex diseases, using this knowledge to support selective breeding of healthy stocks.
Hundreds of salmon families
Their project, funded by the UK Government’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), aims to limit the welfare and economic cost associated with disease.
The team will focus on fish heart and gill health, using detailed studies of the species’ DNA code, genes linked to key traits, and research into the immune system to improve resilience to disease throughout the fish lifecycle.
The team will track hundreds of salmon families across the full production cycle, focusing on key areas, including seeking to understand the diversity of genomes, the impact of early rearing practices and developing novel characteristics to select the most robust fish from the breeding population.
Vaccination response
Scientists will investigate how the rearing temperature during early development of fish impacts the link between disease, immunity, and response to vaccination. They will also develop novel ways to separately measure disease resistance, tolerance, and infectivity as traits for robustness.
The project, involving research on Mowi’s first dedicated Scottish salmon breeding population, will be bolstered by recruitment of key research posts, bidirectional career development support, and a programme of community engagement to raise awareness of the research among the public.
Mowi Scotland’s health, welfare and biology director, Professor Herve Migaud, said: “The scientific objectives outlined are highly strategically relevant and deliver immediate translational opportunities to salmon production to benefit the Scottish, UK and global salmon farming sectors, further increasing animal welfare, profitability, sustainability, and societal acceptance.”
Dr Nick Wade, group leader in aquaculture genetics at Roslin, said the project seeks to advance the fundamental understanding of fish health and robustness at multiple levels across the salmon life cycle, “a proposal only possible through such a large-scale partnership with industry”.
