MOLECULAR TOOLS FOR MAPPING THE BLACK TIGER SHRIMP (P. monodon) GENOME

¹ CSIRO Tropical Agriculture, Molecular Animal Genetics Centre Level 3, Gehrmann Laboratories, University of Queensland, St. Lucia 4072, Australia

² Australian Institute of Marine Science, Marine Biotechnology PMB 3, Townsville Mail Centre QLD 4810, Australia

³ Laboratoire Génome et Populations, SMEL 1, Quai de la Daurade 34200 SETE, France

⁴ Department of Biology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong

⁵ Department of Biochemistry Faculty of Science Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330, Thailand

The black tiger shrimp P. monodon is the most important shrimp aquaculture species in Southeast Asia and Australia. Until now, this US $3 billion industry has relied solely on broodstock captured from the wild. Domestication of this species and selection of genetically superior broodstock has been a research priority for a number of years. To enable prawn farmers to take advantage of genetic marker technology as soon as the life cycle of P. monodon is reliably closed and genetic selection programs can commence, we are developing tools to study the P. monodon genome in an international collaborative effort. AFLP markers will form the framework for a reference linkage map of P. monodon. The map will contain other Type II markers such as microsatellites and Type I markers in order to enable comparative mapping across penaeid species. Ten AFLP primer sets have been analysed to date on four shrimp families. Five new microsatellite markers have been developed over the last year for use in mapping, DNA fingerprinting and population genetics. In an effort to map type I markers and anchor loci, we have used a bank of expressed sequence tags to establish intron-length polymorphisms and 3'UTR markers. So far, polymorphic introns have been found in four shrimp genes which have shown to be polymorphic in more than one species of penaeid shrimp and may therefore be useful as anchor loci. We are also in the process of developing a shrimp BAC library as a resource for gene mapping and gene isolation.