Cédric Pincent has been involved in the genetic development of shrimp for the aquaculture since 2001 , first as a breeding program advisor in aquaculture with SYSAAF (www.sysaaf.com ) after what time he joined Groupe Grimaud as Director R&D for their Swine breeding activity. Since 2018 he has joined the Blue Genetics team where today he is in charge of all R&D activities in France, Mexico and USA. In this position he is responsible for the continuation and improvement of both the Golden Line and the Texas Line, and he is key in the continued improvement of these lines.
Breeding programs in Aquaculture have evolved a lot in the last decades. From mass selection to handle a single trait in the past to present day programs where we can benefit from molecular tools and powerful phenotyping instruments to handle more traits with a much higher accuracy.
The development of these molecular tools that include a high number of markers allows to drive breeding schemes pooling all families and challenging them in a commercial environment. In addition, we can add the genomic information of genotyped animals to increase accuracy and considerably advance the efficiency of the yearly genetic progress.
In the future, some recently developed sequencing techniques will allow to access an even larger number of markers, once again improving accuracy.
Meanwhile techniques evolution allows to measure and select more and more traits simultaneously: traits related to reproduction, feed efficiency, robustness and quality traits like morphology, tail/ meat yield, colour of animals, flesh composition.
We should also mention a large panel of image analysis tools (colorimetry, hyperspectral imaging, X Ray) that are becoming more and more accessible for further analysis of the whole animal.
These advanced techniques open a few doors to shrimp breeding companies with a strong genetic team to handle , and improve, a broad scope of traits, helpful for the shrimp industry evolution. This is a major asset in the development of more efficient shrimp lines, and breeding companies will have to master at least some of these tools to stay competitive in the future.