in marine farmed stock. Disease has a direct impact on farm income through inventory losses and an indirect impact by influencing consumer demand. Fortunately the rate of genetic improvement for functional traits such as disease resistance can be greatly improved by using a new method of animal breeding called genomic selection. This technique uses five thousand "SNP" genetic markers to determine which of the offspring produced by a disease-resistant family have inherited the disease-resistant alleles.. We are testing whether genomic selection can improve growth rate in saltwater, rapid adaptation to seawater, disease resistance and delay sexual maturity relative to a conventional breeding program currently used at Cooke Aquaculture Inc. in New Brunswick. We are accomplishing this within a three year period using archived fin-clip samples and estimated breeding values (EBVs) from current and past broodstock and their relatives, as well as the performance of their relatives in seawater farm cages. We will predict genetic changes in economically important traits that would accrue from the use of genomic selection, and compare this to current selection programs. Disease resistance is being determined by challenge of post smolts with the salmon louse and ISA by Dr. Brian Glebe's quarantine lab at Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s St. Andrews Biological Station. (Funding: NSERC Strategic grant: PI: myself, co-investigators: Dr. L.R Schaeffer and Dr. P.T. Schulte, collaborators Cooke Aquaculture and Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.).
· Seamone, B., Boulding, E.G. in press. Aggregation of the Northern Abalone, Haliotis kamtschatkana, with respect to sex and spawning condition. J Shellfish Res XXX:XX.
· Freamo, H., O'Reilly, P., Berg, P.R., Lien, S., Boulding, E.G. 2011. Identification of non-neutral single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that confirm genetic structure between inner and outer Bay of Fundy metapopulations of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). Mol Ecol Res 11 (Suppl. 1), 254-267 (Special Issue: SNP Development in Non-Model Organisms).
· Naish K.A., Boulding, E.G. 2010. Corrigendum for Trinucleotide microsatellite markers for the Zebra Mussel, Dreissena polymorpha, an invasive species in Europe and North America. Mol Ecol Res 11:223-224.
· Pakes, D., Boulding, E.G. 2010. Changes in the selection differential exerted on a marine snail during the ontogeny of a predatory shore crab. J Evol Biol 23: 1613-1622. pdf preprint
· Lee, H.J., Boulding, E.G. 2010. Latitudinal clines in body size, but not in thermal tolerance or heat shock cognate 70 gene (HSC70) in the highly-dispersing intertidal gastropod, Littorina keenae (Gastropoda: Littorinidae). Biol J Linn Soc 100: 494-505. pdf preprint
· Lee, H.J., Boulding, E.G. 2009. Spatial and temporal population genetic structure of four northeastern Pacific littorinid gastropods: the effect of mode of larval development on variation at one mitochondrial and two nuclear DNA markers. Mol Ecol 18: 2165-2184. pdf preprint
· Lemay, M.A., Boulding, E.G. 2009. Microsatellite pedigree analysis reveals high variance in reproductive success and reduced genetic diversity in hatchery-spawned northern abalone. Aquaculture 295: 22-29 pdf preprint
· Boulding, E.G., deWaard J.R., Ang K.P, Hebert P.D.N. 2009. Population genetic structure of the salmon louse, Lepeophtheirus salmonis (Krøyer) on wild and farmed salmonids around the Pacific coast of Canada. Aqua Res 40: 973-979. pdf preprint
· Boulding, E.G. 2008. Genetic diversity, adaptive potential, and population viability in changing environments. pp. 199-219 In: Conservation Biology: Evolution in Action. Edited by Scott Carroll and C. Fox. Oxford University Press. ISBN13: 978-0-19-530679-8. pdf preprint
· Boulding, E.G., M. Culling, B. Glebe, P.R. Berg, S. Lien, and T. Moen. 2008. Conservation genomics of Atlantic salmon: SNPs associated with QTLs for adaptive trait differences in parr from four trans-Atlantic backcrosses. Heredity 101: 381–391. pdf reprint supplemental data
· Zahradnik, T. D., M. A. Lemay and E. G. Boulding. 