The team will develop a sensitive genomic tool for multiple marine mussels, known keystone species, enabling more accurate health assessments of coastal zones including aquaculture operations, thus facilitating the ability to monitor the effects of the changing environment.

Increasing environmental pressures on the BC coastline have affected both coastal habitats and the productivity of the aquaculture industry. Factors that threaten the marine ecosystem include environmental, biological and human influences, which are significantly affecting the marine mussel aquaculture industry. This project aims to study how environmental stress affects three marine mussel species (Mytilus spp.) by assessing the gene expression patterns that change in response to environmental fluctuations. These species are known as ecosystem bioindicators and are also farmed in aquaculture operations worldwide. The development of a genomic assessment tool for mussels will lead to the sustained productivity and development of mussel aquaculture. Given that mussels are dominant organisms in estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems, the tool will also provide indicators of overall marine health. As sedentary organisms, mussels are more accurate biomarkers for natural and man-derived influences than mobile species, such as fish. Therefore analysis of mussel genomic expression patterns will enable effective monitoring of the impact of environmental stressors, including climate changes, in different coastal habitats.

Unexplained shellfish mortality at four of the major BC aquaculture companies accounted for nearly six million dollars in lost sales in 2007. The combination of many different factors may have contributed to these losses. There are three major groups of stresses in the coastal environment: environmental factors (e.g. temperature, salinity and food availability), biological influences (e.g. bacteria and toxic algae) and human-derived stressors (e.g. pollutants and resource usage).

Current methods to measure environmental impacts on mussel health are time-consuming and use mainly unreliable physiological changes. An accurate measure of the genes that are up- and down-regulated in response to stressors would be a major advancement in understanding the stress responses of these organisms, as well as determiners of a fatal response. The research group aims to identify genes that act as biomarkers for genomic stress in response to multiple stressing conditions that would be found in the marine environment.