Public Funding for Xelect Limited

Around one out of every two fish eaten each day now comes from aquaculture. Salmon and other farmed fish are at a relatively early stage of domestication and there is considerable scope for increasing production efficiency and quality by using modern genetic technologies to select broodstock. Salmon that produce more muscle fibres have higher growth rate and superior growth rate. In order to discover genetic markers associated with a higher fibre number it is first necessary to measure up to a million muscle fibres in each of hundreds of individual salmon. This project will exploit advances in image analysis to develop a highly automated workflow to capture, recognise and quantify images of muscle fibres to facilitate this task. The trait data obtained will be integrated with genetic analysis to develop a practical means of selecting superior quality broodstock with a high fibre muscle number.

Xelect Limited is a new spinout company from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Our core business is the development and licensing of genetic markers for optimized production traits in farmed fish. Our tests allow breeders to select parent fish with the most valuable characteristics from among the natural variation. The fat content of salmon is essential to the flavour and nutritional value of the product. Salmon is an important source of Omega3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are highly beneficial to human health. We aim to develop DNA marker tests to select the potential broodstock with naturally and heritably high levels of Omega3 production efficiency. This will allow a cost effective method of maintaining the optimal levels of health benefits in farmed salmon. We propose support from TSB to allow us to use the expertise of Stirling University to scientifically validate our data, ensuring the quality and integrity of our results.