Elmer Lab

New paper available as a preprint on biorxiv with Arne Jacobs and IBAHCM colleague Martin Llewellyn (and other great sea louse collaborators) on Genetic fingerprinting of salmon louse (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) populations in the North-East Atlantic using a random forest classification approach Arne Jacobs, Michele De Noia, Kim Praebel, Øyvind Kanstad-Hanssen, Marta Paterno, Dave Jackson, Philip McGinnity, Armin Sturm, Kathryn R. Elmer, Martin S. Llewellyn http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/21/179218 Caligid sea lice represent a significant threat to salmonid aquaculture worldwide. Lepeophtheirus salmonis is the predominant species that occurs in the Northern Hemisphere. Dispersal of sea lice between marine aquaculture sites and geographic regions is thought to occur rapidly via planktonic transport of larvae. Population genetic analyses have consistently shown minimal population genetic structure in North Atlantic L. salmonis, frustrating efforts to track louse populati...

The organization of functional regions within genomes has important implications for the evolutionary potential of species. We compared the distribution of nearly a thousand ecologically relevant QTL within and across six salmonids (Arctic charr, Atlantic salmon, lake whitefish, rainbow trout, chinook salmon, coho salmon ) to understand their distribution across the genome. Using a novel analytical framework for comparative mapping and significance testing, we identified synteny blocks and co-localized clusters for phenotypic traits across and within species. Specifically, only two or three pairs of traits were significantly co-localized in three species (lake whitefish, coho salmon, and rainbow trout). These findings suggest genetic linkage between traits within species is relatively rare, advancing our understanding of the renowned ecological and phenotypic variability in salmonid fishes. This project was a collaboration based on an idea hatched by Kathryn, consultation and insight...