Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XI ConferenceJanuary 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Workshop: Aquaculture
Two of the most prominent applications of genomics to enhancing our understanding of the mapping of genotype onto phenotype, and eventually using this information for applied purposes, are microarray-based gene expression profiling, and association studies. I will discuss some of the lessons learned from our studies of Drosophila and other model organisms in relation to the possibilities for aquaculture research. In particular, it is now clear that gene expression profiles differ among any two individuals for between 10 and 25% of the transcriptome. It is likely that there is population structure to the distribution of transcriptional variation, but the degree of structure will depend on environmental, historical and breeding parameters that are species-specific. This information will need to be taken into account when assessing the significance of apparent associations between transcript abundance and phenotypes of economic importance. I will also discuss approaches toward associating SNP variation with both transcriptional variation and phenotypic variation, and for detecting regulatory sites that may be responsible for modulation of gene expression.