Project coordinator: Peer Berg (Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences).
Although aquaculture of rainbow trout has been well established in Denmark for many years, the first attempt to initiate a proper large-scaled breeding programme took place in 1997, when aquacultural organisations expressed their desire for a breeding station. The breeding station is now built and will be inaugurated in June 2000. The initiative was based on the promising results of a multidisciplinary research programme funded by the Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Research Council (SJVF). In this research programme, 50 halfsib-families were produced using a partly factorial design and characterised with respect to VHS resistance, growth and feed conversion. Also in the Biotechnology Programme, inbred families were made that were very susceptible or (almost) resistant to VHS. Results of both research programmes indicated a genetic variation in both disease resistance and growth parameters within the Danish rainbow trout population and indicated the potential of improvement a breeding programme might result in.
The overall objective of the project is to evaluate the use of resistance to specific diseases, as measured in challenge experiments, as a selection criterion for genetically improving rainbow trout.
Given the large reproductive potential of fish, a large number of offspring from a group or family of fish can be characterised with respect to disease resistance by challenging siblings by pathogens under controlled aquarium-experiments. This study is based on families from the Danish trout breeding programme, where families are tested on the breeding station for growth and feed efficiency and siblings are challenged with pathogens causing VHS, ERM and YDS at DVL. In the first two years a total of 80 families is challenged.
This will be combined with a detailed surveillance of disease incidence and presence of pathogens at the breeding station.
These data provides potential for estimation of genetic variation in resistance towards these specific pathogens, and it allows for specific disease resistance to be introduced as a selection criterion.