Advancing disease-resistant stock in aquaculture: a brief overview

Abstract

The effective management of diseases caused by aquatic pathogens is one of the primary challenges in aquaculture. The breeding of disease-resistant fish requires a combination of traditional and modern genetic approaches. With an increasing global population and demand for food, fish provides a valuable source of dietary protein, particularly in regions where access to meat and poultry may be limited. Selective breeding facilitates the production of fish broodstocks with desirable traits, such as disease resistance and low feed conversion ratio. Resistance to diseases is a heritable trait and this offers a good opportunity to carry out selective breeding or even gene editing to produce stocks that are resistant to common diseases. This brief overview discusses the strategies and developments in producing disease-resistant aquaculture species. It examines the existing applications of genomic selection for disease prevention in groupers, salmon and tilapia which have high economic value, as well as potential avenues for adoption by industry expansion and enhancement. Future directions are discussed, including targeted gene editing, functional genomics studies and functional annotation of genomes, to determine the causal variations underlying disease-resistance traits to breed aquaculture stocks with increased resistance to diseases and parasites.