HAVBRUK2-Stort program for havbruksforskning

In the past the lack of annotated fish genomes hampered the application of systems biology in fish research. Due to the ever-increasing availability of fish reference genomes, this final limitation is being overcome. Only recently also an annotated genome assembly of the Atlantic salmon became publicly available. However, technical and bioinformatics challenges do remain, as the validation of the functional annotation of the salmon genome has yet to be performed. The best option to unambiguously do so, is to simultaneously perform a systematic analysis of the naturally expressed complements of the salmon genome (the transcriptome and proteome) and then work backwards. Such an analysis is referred to as proteogenomics, which, as was recently demonstrated for the zebrafish, extends our knowledge of even well annotated genomes and facilitates systems level investigations of fish biology. In the proposed work of the present application, we will use the latest release of the salmon genome and state of the art systems biology expertise from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) to create a customized functional salmon genome database for multi-level omics analysis. At The National Institute for Nutrition and Seafood Research (NIFES) we will implement the tool sets developed at UCSD into computational analyses pipelines currently used in cross-omics research on Atlantic salmon and provide invaluable mechanistic data for addressing challenges to fish health and seafood safety that incur due to use of novel aquafeeds. All work envisaged in this proposal will be performed under the auspices of the on-going NIFES led Norwegian Research Council (NRC) funded project "Evaluation of contaminant interactions using integrative high-throughput technology for aquafeed safety" (AquaSafe; Grant: 254807) whose primary objective is the evaluation of novel plant based aquafeeds' safety utilizing bioinformatics and high -throughput multilevel omics techniques.