Location: National Cold Water Marine Aquaculture Center
Project Number: 8030-10600-003-002-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 6, 2026
End Date: Jul 5, 2027
Objective:
The first objective is to develop resilient and predictable seed production systems for cultivated seaweed, in this case Sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima). Cultivar development through strain selection coupled with the establishment and refining of a scalable gametophyte-based nursery pathway are central to achieving this goal. To begin progress towards these goals, establishment of a comprehensive biobank of wild-type clonal gametophyte lines will be foundational to selective breeding and nursery development programs. This biobank will be coupled with genotyping and high-throughput resiliency screening resulting in a resiliency matrix mapped across the entire biobank library.
The second objective is to improve production efficiency and value added utilization of seaweeds, which crosscuts farm engineering and design, crop performance, biochemical quantification, and primary processing. Achieving predictability of yields, understanding the temporal-spatial variation in commercially important biochemical component concentrations in cultivated seaweeds, and end-use informed stabilization of post-harvest seaweeds are all important metrics towards achieving this objective. Initial assessment of seed produced from foundational crosses of wild-type clonal gametophytes (identified in Objective 1) will be an important first step, coupled with longitudinal and spatial assessment of sulfated polysaccharides.
Approach:
To develop resilient and predictable seed systems, multiple methods will be implemented to establish a foundational wild-type germplasm biobank for S. latissima in the Gulf of Maine including (i) expanding the existing biobank of clonal S. latissima gametophytes with representatives from new coastal populations (ii) developing and implementing a high through put screening method for identifying environmentally resilient clonal strains using non-invasive imaging PAM and fluorescence microscopy to assess physiological response and performance to controlled challenge experiments for thermal and nutrient tolerance, and (iii) primary genomic analysis of promising clonal lines.
To improve production efficiency and value added utilization of seaweeds initial focus will be on assessing the performance of seed produced via single parent crosses of wild-type gametophytes, and assessment of sulfated polysaccharides across sites temporally to both establish a baseline for farmed S. latissima in the Gulf of Maine, and to assess cross by cross variability. This will be pursued by (i) testing various methods for inducing gametogenesis and sporophyte formation for seed production, principally induction in culture vessels prior to application to seed culture substrata vs in-tank induction of gametogenesis following application of vegetative gametophytes to culture substrata. (ii) Assessing whether gametophyte resiliency traits predict sporophyte progeny performance and resilience via controlled tank-based experiments on juvenile sporophytes, or in-situ assessment on experimental farms. (iii) in-situ testing for sulfated polysaccharide content temporally for selected crosses by allowing the crop to go unharvested beyond typical harvest windows.