Enzootic Genetics & Innovation, NRGene and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will create a new technological consortium to apply the latest genomic selection technologies developed by NRGene for the enhancement of Enzootic’s freshwater shrimp breeding program and performance of its proprietary all-female populations.

Based on their successful cooperation from 2018 of sequencing and assembling the world’s first high-quality genome of freshwater shrimp M. rosenbergii, the two tech companies, together with researchers from the Life Sciences Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the support of the Israel Innovation Authority, will harness NRGene’s novel quantitative genomics breeding tools and algorithms to Enzootic’s genetic selection program. The objective of this collaboration is the selection of superior breeding genetics that will eventually translate into an improvement in yield and revenues for farmers using Enzootic’s all-female freshwater shrimp.

“Enzootic assimilates the latest genomic big data tools to accelerate our genetic selection program. Our previous successful collaboration with NRGene and their pioneering genomic tools paved the way for this milestone collaboration,” said managing director of Enzootic Genetics & Innovation, Amit Hochman. “The continual performance improvement of our all-female population is attributed to data-driven parent populations selection, through Enzootic’s hatcheries in Asia and ultimately the yields of farmers that use this proprietary mono-sex farming strategy.”

“Our new collaboration with Enzootic, alongside our past success, is part of NRGene’s strategy to support and enhance breeding of highly important aquaculture species, such as shrimp,” said Gil Ronen, NRGene’s CEO. “We continuously develop powerful big data analysis tools that navigate genetic selection programs like the one implemented in freshwater shrimp by Enzootic.”

“This collaboration, together with academic researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, creates a unique opportunity to align population quantitative genomic data, with our basic science transcriptomic and metabolic libraries, investigated and studied by our group,” said crustacean endocrinologist, Professor Amir Sagi of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “This alignment may shed new light on the understanding and regulation of key physiological processes in M. rosenbergii.”