Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

ESTs, Microarrays And Genomic Research On Salmon (GRASP

, Ben F Koop¹ , William S. Davidson²

¹  Dept of Biolgy, University of Victoria, Victoria BC Canada V8W_2Y2

²  Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6 Canada

The GRASP project is designed to provide a foundation for understanding the genome of Atlantic salmon to benefit conservation and enhancement of wild stocks, aquaculture and environmental assessments. Genomic resources enable us to address fundamental scientific questions concerning the evolution of salmonid genomes, and the expression of genes and proteins in a wide variety of natural and altered environments. More than 100 cDNA libraries have been constructed from a wide variety of tissues and different developmental stages and more than 120,000 DNA sequence 3' reads (plus 15,000 from Rainbow trout) have been completed. These sequences have been combined into over 40,000 unique contigs. A preliminary microarray of 3,700 cDNAs was made and initial expression studies have shown that the array works very well for all salmonids and even some more distant species. The array provides a wealth of new data in the study of cellular and tissue responses to pollutants, diseases and stress, as well as in the study of reproduction and development. On the basis of these results a larger array of 16,000 carefully selected genes has been completed and initial results have shown sensitivity of gene expression patterns to small environmental, disease challenge and physiological changes. In addition to microarrays being a powerful new gene expression tool in environmental, conservation, physiological and fish health studies, we are exploring new applications of cDNA arrays in comparative genomic DNA hybridizations to identify gene duplications and deletions among salmon strains and species and potentially identifying genes on BAC clones.