Summary
This talk explores how genomic approaches reveal adaptive potential in fish populations, with applications to fisheries management, aquaculture, and resilience under extreme conditions.
Fisheries Genomics: Climate change is reshaping fish distributions globally, favouring warm-water species while cold-water specialists like sole face decline. Traditional models miss evolutionary signals, but genomic tools pinpoint adaptive loci—often linked to structural variants and copy number changes—that reflect temperature adaptation. Through our Adapting to Change project, we're integrating genomic offset models with climate projections to forecast adaptive capacity in UK fish populations. I'll share preliminary results on flatfish population structure and discuss how genomic insights can strengthen fisheries management decisions.
Aquaculture Genomics: As tilapia farming expands globally under mounting climate and water-scarcity pressures, understanding the adaptive toolkit becomes critical. For this, we've developed high-quality genome assemblies for improved strains: a chromosome-level GIFT (Oreochromis niloticus) assembly revealing beneficial introgression from O. mossambicus, and an Abbassa (GIANT) assembly reconstructing sex-determining haplotypes. Comparative analyses of wild tilapia populations uncover domestication signatures and focal analysis identifies variation in noncoding regions likely driving adaptive traits. We test this by mapping chromatin-accessibility in gill tissue, identifying cis-regulatory loci controlling salinity tolerance and osmoregulation across the Oreochromis phylogeny.
Extreme Environments: As aquaculture pushes into new frontiers to meet global food demand, understanding how fish adapt to extreme stressors becomes essential. The Fishnauts in Space project tests how embryos respond to microgravity and cosmic radiation. Early findings reveal targeted (epi)genetic responses in DNA repair and development, suggesting surprising resilience. These insights inform both space aquaculture design and breeding for strains robust to Earth's climatic stressors.
Brief biography
Dr Tarang Mehta completed his PhD at the National University of Singapore, characterising Hox gene clusters in jawless vertebrates and timing vertebrate whole genome duplication events in the group of Byrappa Venkatesh and Sydney Brenner. After graduating, he completed two postdoctoral positions in the groups of Federica Di-Palma and Wilfried Haerty at the Earlham Institute (Norwich, UK), focused on characterising gene regulatory networks associated with adaptive traits in fish. Tarang recently became a Group Leader in Computational Biology at the University of Liverpool (UK) in 2024, where his research broadly explores the genetic underpinnings of vertebrate adaptive traits and disease response, with an outlook towards preserving organismal health and biodiversity. Since much of his work utilises multi-omics data to characterise genetic diversity and identify markers of economically important traits, he also focuses on developing novel omics and algorithmic approaches for analysing complex genomes.