Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XVII ConferenceJanuary 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Christopher A Saski1 , Richard Hilderman1 , Robert W Chapman2 , John A Benzie4
Shrimp, the most valuable aquaculture product with a worldwide value in 2008 of 26 billion are mainly produced in Asia and South America, but US companies play a crucial role in technology development and the supply of domesticated and genetically improved strains to the world industry. Genomic platforms are required to speed selection programs and to enable faster development of solutions to significant problems confronting the industry such as viral diseases that have devastated production with losses of billions of dollars over the last two decades. Access to genomic tools will be crucial to help ensure supply of a valuable commodity in the face of limited capacity worldwide to increase production area. The inefficiencies associated with shrimp BAC cloning have been circumvented by developing genomic fosmid libraries for the two most valued cultured species of shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei and Penaeus monodon. These libraries currently each consist of more than 150,000 clones each representing a 2.5 times genomic coverage. Initial data exhibits the feasibility of physical mapping of both libraries using fosmids instead of BACs and High Information Content Fingerprinting (HICF). The details of these libraries, and strategies that will serve as the foundation for the development of the next generation of tools necessary to advance genomics research in shrimp, are discussed.