Skinny kelp (Saccharina angustissima) provides valuable genetics for the biomass improvement of farmed sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima)

• Published in: Journal of Applied Phycology
• Main Authors: Li, Yaoguang, Umanzor, Schery, Ng, Crystal, Huang, Mao, Marty-Rivera, Michael, Bailey, David, Aydlett, Margaret, Jannink, Jean-Luc, Lindell, Scott, Yarish, Charles
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Springer 2022
• Subjects: Saccharina latissima; Saccharina angustissima; Morphological trait; Biomass; Seaweed aquaculture; Pacific; Rivera; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/29728

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Li, Y., Umanzor, S., Ng, C., Huang, M., Marty-Rivera, M., Bailey, D., Aydlett, M., Jannink, J.-L., Lindell, S., & Yarish, C. Skinny kelp (Saccharina angustissima) provides valuable genetics for the biomass improvement of farmed sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima). Journal of Applied Phycology, 34, (2022): 2551–2563, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-022-02811-1. Saccharina latissima (sugar kelp) is one of the most widely cultivated brown marine macroalgae species in the North Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific Oceans. To meet the expanding demands of the sugar kelp mariculture industry, selecting and breeding sugar kelp that is best suited to offshore farm environments is becoming necessary. To that end, a multi-year, multi-institutional breeding program was established by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources (MARINER) program. Hybrid sporophytes were generated using 203 unique gametophyte cultures derived from wild-collected Saccharina spp. for two seasons of farm trials (2019–2020 and 2020–2021). The wild sporophytes were collected from 10 different locations within the Gulf of Maine (USA) region, including both sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima) and the skinny kelp species (Saccharina angustissima). We harvested 232 common farm plots during these two seasons with available data. We found that farmed kelp plots with skinny kelp as parents had an average increased yield over the mean (wet weight 2.48 ± 0.90 kg m−1 and dry weight 0.32 ± 0.10 kg m−1) in both growing seasons. We also found that blade length positively correlated with biomass in skinny kelp x sugar kelp crosses or pure sugar kelp crosses. The skinny x sugar progenies had significantly longer and narrower blades than the pure sugar kelp progenies in both seasons. Overall, these findings suggest ...