SRA

Tilapia is the third most important domesticated food fish in world aquaculture. Artificial selection of Tilapia started in late 1980s and successfully produced many highly productive strains that are well adapted to a wide range of farming conditions. Genetic variation and the genes influencing variation in economically important traits in tilapia strains are not well characterized. In this study, we present a genome-wide identification for signatures of recent selection in tilapia. Using next-generation sequencing technology, we re-sequenced 47 tilapia individuals with a mean of 6-fold genome coverage. We identified a total of 1.43 million high-quality SNPs in the populations using the Broad Institute Nile Tilapia Genome as a reference. We further identified more than a thousand loci in putative selective sweep regions that are defined using a genome-wide extended haplotype homozygosity-based statistics. This initial selective sweep analysis has revealed some interesting candidate genes related to economically important traits such as growth and disease resistance. The results of this study provide a genome-wide map of selection footprints in the tilapia genome and could be important for genetic improvement of the tilapia populations.