To conduct a short term lab placement at the Marine Laboratories in Aberdeen to gain skills in new techniques including producing and maintaining primary cell cultures from gill explants and tissues.

This research travel grant allowed the author to conduct a short term lab placement at the Marine Laboratories in Aberdeen in order to gain skills in new techniques including producing and maintaining primary cell cultures from gill explants and tissues.

Following the short term lab placement in Aberdeen, the author developed techniques to isolate and culture gill cells from Atlantic Salmon. To date, cultures have been maintained for up to 15 days. Ongoing work will involve further development of these techniques to enable isolation of high cell densities of gill cells. In addition adapting cell culture conditions to allow changes in salinity will facilitate the development of assays involving the agent of amoebic gill disease (AGD) in Atlantic Salmon, the marine amoeba, Neoparamoeba perurans. This will in the longer term enable attachment assays to be developed, potentially leading to identifying attachment receptors that may be important in disease development.

The primary reason for this travel was to attend the Fish Breeders' Round Table in Stavanger, Norway. This is an international forum, where knowledge and experience is exchanged between fish breeding researchers and those involved in applied genetic improvement work on a commercial basis.

The forum included over 30 presentations on genomics, genetic models and commercial application of fish breeding. Following the meeting the author visited research institutions and Atlantic Salmon breeding installations.