About the project

The European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) is the second most cultured fish species in the Mediterranean area. The European Aquaculture Technology and Innovation Platform (EATiP) vision for 2030 is to reduce the feed conversion ratio to 1.2, which means an improvement of 35%. To do so an intense and concerted research has to be done on fish nutrition and performance, exploring not only new feed ingredients and feeding strategies, but also, understanding in depth the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating a vast array of pathways and physiological processes. In this context, the Nutrigenomics and Fish Growth Endocrinology Group of the Institute of Aquaculture Torre de la Sal is currently developing important molecular tools to study the regulation of the transcriptome in marine fish species of interest for the Mediterranean Aquaculture (like the transcriptomic database of the gilthead sea bream)

The present European sea bass transcriptomic database is currently under construction and collects data derived from GenBank complete mRNA sequences (492 sequences), a collection of assembled annotated ESTs from the AQUAFIRST EU project (6,953 annotated sequences), and 85,350 new sequences derived from the ARRAINA EU project as the result of  the assembly of high-quality reads from two cDNA 454 normalized libraries of anterior and posterior intestine (1,509,172 reads).