APPLIED GENOMIC BREEDING MORE NUTRITIOUS KELPS FOR HUMAN AND ANIMAL FOOD

As part of our Phase I SBIR project "Applied Genomic Studies for Breeding More Nutritious Kelps for Human and Animal Food", we aim to develop an initial breeding program to produce kelp with lower levels of iodine and heavy metals. Kelp is a promising future crop that provides lots of nutritional value and has the potential to increase US food and nutrient security. Kelp requires no arable land, freshwater, fertilizer, and pesticides to grow, and is generally farmed in opposite seasons compared to other marine industries, allowing for mariners to add kelp farming into their daily operations. While kelp farming provides numerous health and environmental benefits, the nascent kelp farming industry in the US struggles to compete on pricing with wild harvests or imports of kelp from Asia. Decreasing the costs of production of kelp can help the domestic industry compete, while also opening up new downstream markets for the kelp grown on farms. While there are many ways to lower the production costs for kelp farming, we are focusing on two specific traits for breeding improvement in this project that should lower production costs while making the kelp safer to eat - reducing sugar kelp iodine and heavy metal content. Kelp accumulates iodine as it is grown in the ocean, and uses the iodine as an integral piece in predator defense. Sugar kelp accumulates so much iodine that the industry uses blanching, an expensive and energy intensive method, to remove iodine from the sugar kelp to make it safer for humans to eat before it enters food production pipelines. This blanching process also removes much other nutritional value in kelp as well. Therefore, developing cultivars of sugar kelp that accumulate less iodine can reduce the blanching needs for the industry, decreasing the costs of production while increasing the nutritional value of the domestically produced kelp. Sugar kelp may also accumulate heavy metals depending on strain and location. Elevated levels of heavy metals have been demonstrated to have carcinogenic and other negative human health effects. We aim to breed kelp with lower heavy metal concentrations, with the ultimate goal of increasing the amount of kelp available for domestic food markets that can be safely eaten by the domestic consumer. Kelp used for human food or ingredients have the highest market value, and so producing kelp with these higher value markets in mind will help the industry increase profitability and the scale of production.Breeding methods developed in agriculture leverage both farm performance data and plant genetics in breeding models that can accurately predict farm performance. We aim to translate these agricultural advances to aquaculture and to rapidly produce sugar kelp cultivars needed to scale the domestic industry. Preliminary data suggests that iodine is a good target for breeding due to variability of iodine among different individuals grown on the same farm. We also have hundreds of dried tissue samples from different strains, farm locations, and farm seasons that have not yet been analyzed for iodine and heavy metal concentrations, but will provide the necessary compositional data for a preliminary breeding program. We also have access to the genetic information required for these breeding projects as part of an earlier Department of Energy sugar kelp biomass breeding project, and can recreate crosses using an already established sugar kelp seedbank. We are in position to leverage these available resources, combining genetics with farm data to rapidly implement a nutritious sugar kelp breeding program using known breeding pipelines that will predict farm performance (iodine and heavy metal content) based on strain genetic information. This is a powerful technique as potential performance of strains can be predicted without having to generate farm data. This project aims to kickstart a nutritious sugar kelp breeding program by generating preliminary iodine and heavy metal compositional data and an initial genomic selection breeding model to produce healthier sugar kelp. This preliminary model will have to be validated with several farm seasons of data, which we plan on achieving in a subsequent Phase II application. We hope that the impact of this breeding program is threefold - 1) assist in scaling the domestic kelp industry by reducing the cost of production of kelp farming, opening up more downstream markets and increasing the value of the kelp farmed in the US, 2) increasing the amount of kelp produced and consumed in the US, and 3) increase breeding efforts for kelp in the US and globally. Our previous sugar kelp biomass model successfully translated agricultural breeding techniques to the aquaculture space. We aim to build on this previous breeding project, continuing to transform previously undomesticated US kelp into a new crop that provides marine jobs and increases US food and nutrient security