Increased robustness in farmed rainbow trout through epigenetics for sustainable production (EpiTrout)

Background

Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector, contributing markedly to global food security. Temperature rise linked to climate change is an immediate and future threat to the sustainable growth of the sector. The negative impact of temperature rise on farmed fish is expected to be more in Sweden than elsewhere. It is because i) Sweden´s average temperature is rising more than the global average, and ii) the major commercial fish in Sweden, rainbow trout, are adapted to cold water and have narrow thermal tolerance limits. There is a great need to develop a sustainable adaptive management strategy to address the impacts of temperature rise on farmed trout.

Aim

The project aims to:

1. verify whether conditioning the parental generation of rainbow trout by exposure to phloroglucinol, a bioactive compound, could induce high-temperature stress (HTS) tolerance in the fish, both within and across generations.

2. study the underlying roles of defence-related genes and epigenetic programming (focusing on DNA methylation) on the possible HTS-tolerance traits.

3. develop epigenetics marks as biomarkers for rainbow trout HTS-tolerance traits.

Project group and external partners

Project coordinator: Parisa Norouzitallab, Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Animal Science and Welfare, SLU

Internal partners: 

Christos Palaiokostas, Associate Professor at the Department of Animal Genetics and Breeding, SLU

Hanna Carlberg, Researcher at the Department of Applied Animal Science and Welfare, SLU

External partners: 

Vattenbrukscentrum Norr AB, Svensk Fiskhälsa and Sepantech AB.