October 16, 2019 — A dozen East Coast universities and federal science groups have been awarded a five-year, $4.4 million contract by NOAA to advance selective breeding of oysters for aquaculture.
The Eastern Oyster Breeding Consortium is led by longtime colleagues and collaborators Stan Allen of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences and Ximing Guo of Rutgers University, who in 1994 made a first breakthrough with breeding tetraploid oysters, a building block for today’s aquaculture industry.
Research at the Rutgers Haskins Shellfish Laboratory and the VIMS Aquaculture Breeding and Technology Center used traditional breeding techniques to develop strains of Eastern oysters that are now quite resistant to MSX, a parasitic disease that for decades depressed oysters harvests.
In pockets where old oyster beds survived, MSX tended to weaken and kill new shellfish within a couple of years. The development of resistant strains enabled a modest revival that today has grown to a $90 million aquaculture industry, with a growing economic impact from the Carolinas to Maine.