FishPopTrace-Developing SNP-based population genetic assignment methods to investigate illegal fishing

The FAO estimates that 80% ofmarine fish stocks are fully or overexploited worldwide. Illegal unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing contributes vastly to this condition, and poses a severe threat to marine ecosystems. Controlling for compliance and enforcing fishing regulations is hampered by difficulties in identifying the geographic origin of fish and fish products, at point of landing and further down the food supply chain. While forensic genetic species identification methods are routinely employed to investigate commercial fraud, there are at present no validated methods for identifying the geographic origin of marine fish. FishPopTrace is an international project, funded by the EU framework programme (FP7), aiming to generate forensically validated panels of SNP markers for geographic origin assignment in four commercially important fish species, cod (Gadus morhua), hake (Merluccius merluccius), herring (Clupea harengus) and common sole (Solea solea). 454-sequencing with sample tagging is employed to generate large numbers of population informative candidate SNP loci in each species. Selected SNPs are subsequently genotyped using Illumina 1536-arrays across populations to provide high resolution maps of genetic variation. Panels comprising subsets of these markers will ultimately be validated for traceability and enforcement applications. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.