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Understanding the molecular bases controlling complex traits in livestock is essential for optimizing genetic selection methods and thus improving breeding.

Any animal or plant population, wild or domesticated, evolves through continuous and cumulative changes over time, based on various evolutionary forces, namely selection, genetic drift, mutation and migration, with relative effects that depend on population history and structure. The footprints left along the genome by these evolutionary processes may correspond to positive selection of favorable alleles, resulting in highly homozygous regions with low genetic diversity, or, on the contrary, to balancing selection phenomena enabling regions to be maintained in a heterozygous state and thus with high genetic diversity.

Climate change is already causing, and will continue to cause, more and more heat waves. These heat waves have a negative effect on water quality in aquaculture farms: higher temperatures and lower levels of available oxygen in the water. Technical solutions are available to limit these sometimes rapid and severe variations in temperature and oxygenation in trout farms, but they are often costly. Selecting animals that can withstand these heat waves is therefore a promising way of coping with the impact of climate change. Scientists at INRAE, in collaboration with SYSAAF (the French poultry and aquaculture breeders' association) and two French trout breeding companies, have studied the feasibility of breeding for resistance to hyperthermia (exposure to high temperatures) and/or hypoxia (exposure to reduced oxygen levels).