Individual variation in confinement response at 168h

Farmed fish are unavoidably exposed to husbandry-related stressors which can result in outbreaks of disease, reduced reproductive success and poor growth. Biomarkers are needed for the establishment of selective breeding approaches for the production of stress resistant fish. In this context, microarray analysis has been carried out on liver tissues of two genetic lines of rainbow trout, high responders (HR) and low responders (LR), after confinement for various time periods. Microarray hybridisations provided gene expression profiles for 10 individual fish (5 of the HR line and 5 of the LR line) after 168h of confinment stress. Keywords : stress response, individual variation, fixed time point, comparison of two lines All 10 samples were hybridised against a common reference source that contained equal amounts of all 10 samples. Each sample was hybridised twice against this reference using a dye-swap setup.