I-Corps: Biomarker-assisted Breeding for Yield and Resilience of Commercial Shellfish Aquaculture in a Changing Ocean

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Aquaculture, the fastest growing sector of global food production, now accounts for more than half of global aquatic production, having surpassed capture fisheries in 2013. Unfortunately, aquaculture relies largely on natural or hatchery propagation of wild stocks and boasts few domesticated species. This primitive exploitation of wild captives must be rectified quickly, if we are to meet seafood demand and serious challenges to the sustainability of aquaculture, such as increasing competition for coastal growing areas, adverse interactions between wild and farmed stocks, emerging diseases, ocean warming, and ocean acidification. Commercial breeding programs can help to meet these global challenges, by accelerating the development and improvement of domesticated stocks for aquaculture, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating interactions with wild populations. The Pacific oyster is one of the top global aquaculture species. Production of this species on the U.S. West Coast has already been impacted by ocean acidification and emerging diseases. Project participants recently founded a start-up shellfish breeding company, Pacific Hybreed, for the commercial development of high-performing shellfish larvae and early juveniles ("seed") to supply regional and global aquaculture markets. The I-Corps project will facilitate this start-up company to translate decades of basic biological research into secure, stable and sustainable supplies of shellfish in the face of changing climate and ocean conditions. The biological parallel between the improved yields of hybrid corn and other crops and of hybrid oysters suggests a business parallel between the development of a shellfish breeding company and the development of the modern crop seed industry, which is today a $20B international enterprise. Fuller understanding of how aquaculture species will respond to environmental change in the world's oceans requires a merging of physiological, genetic and environmental information. Over the last 15 years, this team has repeatedly demonstrated that experimental crosses of inbred lines produce hybrid vigor that is as dramatic as hybrid vigor in corn and other crops. Thus, crossbreeding is the basis for the innovation at the heart of this project; in this context, the Team?s interdisciplinary insights into the genetic, genomic, and physiological causes of hybrid vigor in the Pacific oyster promise the development of biomarkers to improve the efficiency of identifying elite lines and superior hybrid genetic material. The goal of this project is to bring these research elements to bear on commercial production of superior brood stock and high-performing shellfish larvae and early juveniles ("seed"). This I-Corps team will participate in the program's entrepreneurship training, undertake market research, and develop market strategies. The team will contact ~100 shellfish growers, mostly members of the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, to determine (1) the size and structure of the brood stock and seed markets on the U.S. West Coast, (2) the production costs associated with seed supply, (3) the types of brood stock and seed products presently available, and (4) the price structures for these products, including premiums paid for triploid vs. diploid seed. Interactions with potential customers will enable the team to develop a strategy for marketing high-performing brood stock and seed. The short-term outcome from this project will be a business plan that is based on hard numbers about the shellfish seed market along the U.S. West Coast and is therefore suitable for review, first, by our shellfish industry partners and, eventually, by outside investors. The long-term contribution of this project is the application of sophisticated animal-breeding technologies to increase food production from global commercial aquaculture.