Fisheries & Aquaculture

Eyal Seroussi is a geneticist oriented towards genomics and bioinformatics. As a principal investigator at the Institute of Animal Science, of the Agricultural Research Organization (ARO), the agricultural research arm of the Israeli government, he oversees projects involved with animal genomics. Current aquaculture projects mostly deal with characterization of sex determination (SD) systems in species in which mono-sex cultures have an important impact on the production; including tilapia, mullet, grouper and guppy. In the late 90's, he completed postdoctorate research at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, where he was part of the team that sequenced the first human chromosome. In the post genomic era, he helped to identify major milk QTLs in Holsteins, critical miss-identified genes in chicken (e.g., leptin) and mutations underlying blindness in sheep. He also developed methodologies for the study of DNA copy number variations (CNVs). He hypothesizes that in fishes, SD systems are manifestations of CNVs.