%0 Journal Article
%T Heritability of cortisol response to confinement stress in European sea bass dicentrarchus labrax
%A Filip AM Volckaert
%A Bart Hellemans
%A Costas Batargias
%A Bruno Louro
%A C¨¦cile Massault
%A Jeroen KJ Van Houdt
%A Chris Haley
%A Dirk-Jan de Koning
%A Adelino VM Canario
%J Genetics Selection Evolution
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1297-9686-44-15
%X The F1 progeny analysed (n£¿=£¿922) belonged to a small effective breeding population with contributions from an unbalanced family structure of just 10 males and 2 females. Heritability values ranged from 0.54 (¡À0.21) for body weight to 0.65 (¡À0.22) for standard body length and were low for cortisol response i.e. 0.08 (¡À0.06). Genetic correlations were positive (0.94) between standard body length and body weight and negative between cortisol and body weight and between cortisol and standard body length (£¿0.60 and £¿0.55, respectively).This study confirms that in European sea bass, heritability of growth-related traits is high and that selection on such traits has potential. However, heritability of cortisol response to stress is low in European sea bass and since it is known to vary greatly among species, further studies are necessary to understand the reasons for these differences.Farming of European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax, Moronidae, Teleostei), represents about 100 000 tons produced per year [1] and attracts extensive interest as a major fish species for establishing breeding programmes to improve production traits. In fish, the most studied production traits in terms of heritability are body weight or growth, stress or disease resistance [2-6].In this work, our aim was to set up European sea bass families by assigning parentage and heritability for three traits i.e. cortisol response to stress, body weight and standard body length to the progeny derived from the batch of a single spawning day.The methodology used for producing, phenotyping and genotyping the F1 population has been described by Massault et al [7]. In summary, the broodstock consisted of 34 females, 22 males and one individual of undetermined sex originating from wild and caged fish. From this broodstock, 2000 offspring were raised for 254 days under standard farm conditions and then distributed into four tanks of 45 m3, each with a net covering the inner surface. After this period of acclima
%U http://www.gsejournal.org/content/44/1/15