Genomic resources for the aquaculture of European sea bass

The BASSMAP consortium, funded by the European Union, has been set up to improve the understanding of the genome of European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax). The aim is to locate genes of known function on the physical map and to compare specific regions among perciforms. We produced an F1 cross of outbred sea bass as mapping panel and a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome library (7× redundancy and 165 kb average insert size). We use a panel of 21 wild sea bass to test for marker polymorphisms. All family genotypes are submitted to a database for pedigrees, markers and phenotypes (www.resspecies.org). These data will construct a first generation map including 162 microsatellite markers and 25 linkage groups (2n=24). A new second generation linkage map including 369 polymorphic microsatellite and AFLP markers, covering 34 linkage groups, will be disseminated via the mapping database (www.thearkdb.org). A set of 14 tissue specific cDNA banks have been constructed; 28,000 Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) have been sequenced in a data base (CeBiTec, U. Bielefeld). The sequences are annotated, screened for variation and mapped.