Heritability of cortisol response to confinement stress in European sea bass dicentrarchus labrax

Genetics Selection Evolution

Research

Bruno Louro¹  Adelino VM Canario¹  Chris Haley²  Cécile Massault³  Dirk-Jan de Koning⁴  Costas Batargias⁵  Filip AM Volckaert⁶  Bart Hellemans⁶  Jeroen K J Van Houdt⁷ 

[1] Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), University of Algarve, P-8005-139, Gambelas, Faro, Portugal;Division of Genetics and Genomics, Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Roslin, Midlothian, EH25 9PS, Edinburgh, UK;Division of Genetics and Genomics, Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Roslin, Midlothian, EH25 9PS, Edinburgh, UK;Animal Breeding and Genetics Group, Wageningen University, Postbox 338, NL-6700AH, Wageningen, The Netherlands;Division of Genetics and Genomics, Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Roslin, Midlothian, EH25 9PS, Edinburgh, UK;Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 750 07, Uppsala, Sweden;Laboratory of Applied Fish Genetics and Fish Breeding, Department of Aquaculture & Fisheries Management, Technological Educational Institute of Messolonghi, 30200, Nea Ktiria, Messolonghi, Greece;Laboratory of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Genomics, KU Leuven, Ch. Deberiotstraat 32, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium;Laboratory of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Genomics, KU Leuven, Ch. Deberiotstraat 32, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium;Laboratory for Cytogenetics and Genome Research, KU Leuven, Herestraat 49, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium;

关键词: Cortisol;    Rainbow Trout;    Cortisol Level;    Polymorphism Information Content;    Growth Trait;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1297-9686-44-15

 received in 2011-07-25, accepted in 2012-04-20,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn fish, the most studied production traits in terms of heritability are body weight or growth, stress or disease resistance, while heritability of cortisol levels, widely used as a measure of response to stress, is less studied. In this study, we have estimated heritabilities of two growth traits (body weight and length) and of cortisol response to confinement stress in the European sea bass.FindingsThe F1 progeny analysed (n = 922) belonged to a small effective breeding population with contributions from an unbalanced family structure of just 10 males and 2 females. Heritability values ranged from 0.54 (±0.21) for body weight to 0.65 (±0.22) for standard body length and were low for cortisol response i.e. 0.08 (±0.06). Genetic correlations were positive (0.94) between standard body length and body weight and negative between cortisol and body weight and between cortisol and standard body length (−0.60 and −0.55, respectively).ConclusionThis study confirms that in European sea bass, heritability of growth-related traits is high and that selection on such traits has potential. However, heritability of cortisol response to stress is low in European sea bass and since it is known to vary greatly among species, further studies are necessary to understand the reasons for these differences.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Volckaert et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.