The EU Horizon 2020 project AQUA-FAANG, which ran from 2019 and was coordinated by NMBU/CIGENE, has now concluded after a very active final phase.
AQUA-FAANG was a European project involving 24 different partner institutions from academia and industry, based in eight different countries (UK, Italy, Spain, France, Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Greece). The main aim of the project was to advance European aquaculture through genome functional annotation in six European farmed fish species (Atlantic Salmon, European Seabass, Common Carp, Gilthead Seabream, Turbot, Rainbow Trout). This involved a huge collaborative effort among partners, and the generation of datasets that will be highly valuable to improving the sustainability and productivity of European aquaculture in the future.
CIGENE’s Sigbjørn Lien delivers a welcome talk at the project’s final conference in Edinburgh, October 2023
The Centre Leader at CIGENE, Sigbjørn Lien, was the Project Coordinator for AQUA-FAANG, with several other CIGENE members playing important roles in performing research and management tasks. The project officially concluded in October 2023, with a successful and well-attended final conference taking place at the University of Edinburgh from 11-13 October. Here, the major results and applications of the project were presented, including an ‘industry-facing’ final day that focused on the major tools and datasets that can be utilised by the European aquaculture industry in the short- and long-term future. All presentations were live streamed, and are now available on the AQUA-FAANG YouTube channel.
A range of other resources are now available on the AQUA-FAANG website, including overviews of the main project results as well as links to all publications and protocols produced by the project. Furthermore, all data produced during AQUA-FAANG is publicly available via the ENSEMBL genome browser, and the project has maintained a data portal that supports easy access to all results and related resources.
Short interview videos that summarise the project’s main results are available on the AQUA-FAANG YouTube channel, see link in the text.
The project was recently covered on the CORDIS webpages run the by the European Commission, where a short summary explains the project’s key focus on improving disease resistance in farmed fish.
The AQUA-FAANG white paper was recently published (open access) in the Aquaculture journal. This provides a more in-depth overview of the project’s major results and potential applications to the fish farming industry, including the opprtunities and challenges connected to the uptake of functional annotation information in different species.
If you have any questions about AQUA-FAANG you can contact the Project Manager Joseph Roberston.