Body colouration, an important survival, mate selection and communication mechanism for animals in the wild, has also significant commercial implications. In aquaculture, a darker body colour in prawns can increase farm profitability by AU$ 2-4 dollar per kilo of prawns. Therefore, there is a strong commercial interest in increasing colour intensity of prawns grown in captivity. In this study, the focus was on F. merguiensis, and the determination of factors that could be involved in colour formation in this species.

Molecular techniques were employed to clone and isolate crustacyanin subunits, genes known to be responsible for colouration in other crustacean species, from the muscle/cuticle tissue of F. merguiensis prawns and to develop gene specific primers to quantify the levels of crustacyanin gene expression in the cuticle of prawns displaying three different colour phenotypes (albino, light and dark).

The sequences encoding for the crustacyanin subunits A and C were isolated from the cuticle tissue in F. merguiensis and their expression levels characterised in prawns displaying different colouration patterns.