SNPs, Gene Expression, and Bacterial Taxa Associated with Muscle Yield and Quality Traits in Rainbow Trout

The project aims to perform a large-scale whole-transcriptome sequencing survey using RNA-Seq to identify coding SNP and differential gene expression in fish families showing variations in muscle yield and muscle quality. The survey covers fish families showing phenotypes important for aquaculture such as muscle yield, fillet texture/firmness, fillet lipid content, fillet color, and growth rate. The project will identify informative cSNPs that will be validated and tested for association/linkage with phenotypes. Functional genomics analyses will identify transcriptome-wide global and allele-specific gene expressions associated with the traits.