Major role for Macqueen lab in EU H2020 project 'AQUA-FAANG'

It was recently confirmed that the European Commission will start grant preparation for the Horizon 2020 project 'AQUA-FAANG – Advancing European Aquaculture by Genome Functional Annotation.' The project will run 48 months, has a value of 6 million Euros, and is likely to start in early summer 2019.

This is great news for our lab and an important step forward for ongoing international efforts to better understand the genomic basis of phenotypes in fishes.

The project is being coordinated by Sigbjorn Lien at CIGENE (Norwegian University of Life Sciences). Dan Macqueen (Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh) is the project deputy coordinator. The AQUA-FAANG consortium consist of 24 partners from nine European countries and represents both academia and industry.

The overall aim is to generate genome-wide functional annotation maps for the six commercially most important fish species within European aquaculture and exploit their contribution to variation in traits of commercial relevance, focusing on improved resistance to disease.

See below overview of the project:

The Macqueen lab is leading a work package on the comparative genomics of functional annotation and will have the support of a 38 month post-doctoral position (to be advertised later in 2019).