Professor Dean Jerry is an Aquaculture Geneticist at James Cook University and is the lead researcher on our Value-Adding to Pearl Oysters research project.
This project is aiming to deliver the digital tools, databases and information on genomic breeding values to facilitate industrial-scale breeding programs for the Akoya oyster.
We caught up with Professor Jerry to get a deeper look at the data driven selective breeding of an Akoya oyster.
“Just about everything we eat has had some form of selective breeding applied to it,” says Professor Jerry. “Chicken is a great example of this; what we consume today has been bred to be fast growing and lean.”
In this project, Professor Jerry and his team at JCU are working with West Australian company Broken Bay Pearl Farm to transform the Akoya oyster into a species that can be sold to the restaurant trade following the harvest of its high value pearl. The oysters this project is working with are grown in New South Wales.
No, dear reader, you will not be served an oyster with a pearl nestled inside when you next order oysters at a restaurant. Sorry.
As you walk through the produce and meat sections of a supermarket, take a moment to observe the products available to purchase. There’s a good chance selective breeding has played a role.
From pulses to poultry, the potential to improve the appearance, taste, disease resistance and size of a particular commodity is immense. This can be achieved by unleashing the natural potential within the genome of a species.
“Growth rates are the primary determinant of productivity and profitability,” says Professor Jerry. “Aquaculture only became a serious industry in the 1970s, which means there’s a great deal of potential to transform products into fast-growing, productive food sources, simply through selective genetic breeding.”
The first step to transforming the Akoya oyster into a restaurant quality product is to select the specific traits that will make the species commercially viable.
“The first is meat yield,” explains Professor Jerry, “then we need to consider the sweetness of the meat by examining the glycogen content. This ensures the product is palatable to consumers.”
“We are able to apply some of the principles found in livestock breeding, however, there are some aspects to that approach that can’t be replicated in aquaculture,” he adds.
That’s because determining the mother and father of an individual oyster can’t be done in the same manner as in the livestock industry.
“Unlike when a calf hits the ground and a farmer can tag the animal, when oysters spawn, it’s done so in what is effectively a big soup of sperm and eggs,” explains Professor Jerry.
“This mass spawning event sees fertilisation occur on a scale that you simply can’t keep track of, and you certainly can’t tag a larvae or progeny that’s 1mm long. It’s only until a much later date, when the oyster has reached around 2cm in length, that we can track them with an RFID tag.”
This makes identifying the pedigree of fast growing, highly productive oysters significantly harder. But that challenge doesn’t halt progress, says Professor Jerry.
“To get the pedigree, and to avoid inbreeding when mating groups are produced, we examine the DNA in the same way human paternity tests work,” he says. “This way we can work out who the mum and dad were, it allows us to link that information to the ID of the animal, and then we can measure its performance compared to its siblings and other families in the group.”
“But that’s the easy bit,” laughs Professor Jerry.
The team at JCU identified early on through examining the phenotype of the Akoya oyster, that the variation in growth rate in the species was not all down to genetics and selective breeding.
“Traditionally, you would select the trait that you wanted to breed,” says Professor Jerry. “But with the Akoya oyster, we’ve observed that genetics influences about 30% of the species growth rate, while the other 70% is non genetic, such as environmental factors like food sources and the position in the cage.”
To ensure progress continues, the project team are exploring how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can assist in measuring the phenotype of the Akoya oyster.
“We have thousands of records of individuals that we measure for a specific trait, and that is very labour intensive,” explains Professor Jerry.
The tools to achieve robust and timely predictions of oyster growth and quality are currently limited. And that’s exactly what this project is aiming to change.
“For us at JCU, working with Broken Bay Pearl Farms has been excellent, and I am confident this project will develop the tools that can contribute to industrialising the Akoya oyster,” concludes Professor Jerry.
