Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Workshop: Aquaculture
            

COMPARATIVE MAPPING OF QTL FOR RED BODY COLOR IN TILAPIA

Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, University of New Hampshire, 35 Colovos Rd., Durham, NH, 03824, USA

The development of genomic resources in tilapia has facilitated the search for genes involved in marketable phenotypic traits. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) for red body color have been identified in an Oreochromis niloticus and O. aureus hybrid cross using both categorical and quantitative methods. For both of these methods, identical QTL were identified. The polymerase chain reaction was then used to identify clones from an O. niloticus BAC library that contained the microsatellites directly flanking these QTL. Finally, shotgun sequencing libraries were constructed from these BAC clones and the resulting sequences were compared to available databases using BLAST anlaysis. This approach allowed us to anchor the tilapia linkage map to the Fugu whole genome assembly and to identify putative candidate genes for the mutant red phenotype.