Hakes of the world: clarifying the phylogenetic status of five candidate species

Tuesday 5th February of 2019 at 11h

Conference room at ECIMAT

María Fernández

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Next Tuesday, February 5th, María Fernández, predoctoral researcher of the Marine Genetic Resources group (ReXenMar) of the CIM-UVigo and the AquaCOV group of the Oceanographic Institute of Vigo, will present at the “Café con Sal” conference the lecture “Hakes of the world: clarifying the phylogenetic status of five candidate species“, in which she will lay out the methodology and some of the results of her doctoral thesis.

Diversification of marine species and aquaculture modernization through innovation are essential for the development and sustainability of aquaculture. The first barrier facing the cultivation and conservation of European hake is its controversial species-specific identification, since there are no reliable diagnostic keys inherent to all specimens of a given species. In the last decades, a major breakthrough has been achieved in the phylogeny of Merluccius spp. using different morphological and genetic targets. Nonetheless, the phylogenies constructed so far neither comprised all the extant candidate taxa nor revealed their exact fishing location to reconstruct a comprehensive phylogeny of the genus.

Within this framework, María is conducting her doctoral thesis entitled “Application of genomics and transcriptomics to the cultivation of candidate species in aquaculture” in order to improve the traceability of the genus Merluccius spp., to characterize the new species and to distinguish regional stocks. The thesis, supervised by Dr. Pablo Presa Martínez (ReXenMar, UVIGO) and Dr. Montse Pérez Rodríguez (AquaCOV, IEO), has the financial support of LETSHAKE project (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness), Centro Singular de Investigación Mariña of the University of Vigo (Xunta de Galicia) and the predoctoral scholarship from Xunta de Galicia.

During the conference, María will present the complete phylogenetic structure of the genus Merluccius spp. which includes all the candidate forms and morphotypes described so far in this genus, the methodology used, entailing genetic targets with different evolutionary characteristics, and different phylogenetic reconstruction strategies.

The conference will take place at the conference room of the ECIMAT at 11:00h (CEST) and will be live streamed on http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html and permanently available on CIM and UVigoTV websites.

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