Construction of Radiation Hybrid Panels for Two Major Aquaculture Species: Sturgeon and Oyster

Aquaculture will probably have to increase the production of many marine fishes and other products in the coming years to contribute to fulfilling the needs of an increasing population against a background of the impoverishment of natural resources. Genomics tools for improving the performance of marker assisted selection would be valuable assets for increasing production. Radiation hybrid mapping is one such tool; however, the construction of fish radiation hybrid (RH) panels has long been very difficult in practice. Here, the authors have presented the construction of a sturgeon RH panel and an oyster RH panel. By typing a number of markers corresponding to mRNA and bacterial artificial clone (BAC) ends, they have showed that, the fish panel performs well and would allow the construction of RH maps of several thousand markers. However, by typing 40 markers designed from a BAC sequence, the authors have demonstrated this oyster RH panel could be useful for constructing maps of very high marker density for regions of particular biological interest.