Developments in genomics relevant to disease control in aquaculture

The use of genomic technologies in aquaculture has experienced a rapid expansion over the past decade where functional genomics exemplified by microarray technology has experienced a more comprehensive development than actual genome sequencing. The significant increase in genomic resources driven by large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) sequencing projects and more recently high throughput sequencing technologies has driven this development. Health management and prevention of disease are major issues in aquaculture, and genomics has contributed to a number of key areas in disease research including basic research aimed toward mRNA transcript discovery relevant to the immune response in diverse phylogenetic groups, evaluation of vaccine efficacy and immunostimulant diets, identification of the underlying mechanisms of disease resistance and the development of prognostic markers. © 2012 Woodhead Publishing Limited All rights reserved.