Over more than a decade CSIRO have partnered with aquaculture industry in building breeding programs aimed at realising improved gains from selectively bred animals. The need to build computer systems to support selective breeding has been a key element of success for these partnerships. The approach has been to build computer systems to enable efficient data management and to empower the industry technical managers of the breeding programs to make good and timely breeding decisions. Data is core to selective breeding, the data system enables critical timelines to be met, provides risk mitigation strategies, it frees staff from routine and mundane data management tasks, and in effect defines standard operating protocols.
The processes and learnings from the design and development of databases for varying species has driven continuous improvement and necessitated new design features to stay apace with increasing sophistication. This presentation highlights several key observations pertinent to the development of data systems for finfish, prawn and oyster selective breeding programs and highlights differences and commonalities across each. Advanced breeding techniques, such as genomic selection, have required the implementation of processes for the quality control and storage of SNP data, and the practical challenges this presents are discussed. We also consider the benefits of incorporating breeding-specific functionality such as optimum contribution selection, mate allocation, inbreeding and gains trends and pedigree reporting into the data systems.