Unleashing The Tiger
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AGRF has worked alongside James Cook University researchers to be part of the first ever successful effort to map the genome of an iconic Australian seafood species: the Australian black tiger prawn. As well as providing the blueprint of the creature, this mapping may lead to larger, healthier and more disease-resistant prawn crops in the future.
Dean Jerry, JCU Professor of Aquaculture, talked about how the research came out of the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Advanced Breeding, a collaboration between AGRF, JCU, the University of Sydney, CSIRO and Seafarms Group. Through the use of genetic selection, this partnership aimed to improve productivity and efficiency of prawn farming.
“The idea was to improve the capability of Australian prawn farmers to apply selective breeding practices to produce larger and healthier farmed prawns,” said Professor Jerry. “As part of this project, we set out to sequence the genome of the black tiger prawn. The information in the genome is important for us to know, as it essentially contains the blueprint that determines the makeup and behaviour of the prawn.”
Having this genome means that the efforts of selective breeding of prawns will be improved – mirroring what has happened with livestock and crop species over the last few thousand years.
Small but mighty, the prawn is more complex than one might think, says Professor Jerry. “The prawn is a tiny animal, but its genome is almost as large as a human, and is much more complicated in its structure.”
AGRF Bioinformatics Manager Dr Kenneth Chan echoes this, explaining how the genetic mapping process to reconstruct the genome of the black tiger prawn was diabolically tricky.
“Imagine the task of putting together a 1.9 billion-piece double-sided puzzle with no borders, long repeated overlapping sections, millions of missing pieces, multiple pieces that can fit in the same place, no picture on the box to follow, and possibly lots of pieces from another unrelated puzzle,” said Dr Chan.
Amongst the research, the scientists also found something very unusual in the way the tiger prawn fought viral infections.
CSIRO Senior Research Scientist Dr Nick Wade explained that the viral elements in the genome that help fight viral infections (known as the Endogenous Viral Element, or EVE) is truly unique in the Australian tiger prawn.
“No EVE found in any other animal looks like this,” said Dr Wade. “Discovery of this EVE allows for further research into understanding how prawns deal with infections by viruses and perhaps into new therapies that can be applied to make prawns more resistant to viral diseases,” he said.
Professor Jerry also points to how the benefits of mapping the genome will be seen in a whole range of complementary areas.
“It radically changes the landscape for prawn research, enabling a whole suite of other functional biological studies, including on how to target particular genes for improved selection outcomes, through to precision genome engineering,” he said.
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