Animal Molecular Breeding, 2025, Vol.15, No.2, 91-101 http://animalscipublisher.com/index.php/amb 91 Review and Progress Open Access Genetic Variability and Breeding Strategies for Key Traits During Channa Domestication Xuelian Jiang1,ManmanLi 2 1 Institute of Life Sciences, Jiyang College of Zhejiang A&F University, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China 2 Hainan Institute of Biotechnology, Haikou, 570206, Hainan, China Corresponding author: manman.li@hitar.org Animal Molecular Breeding, 2025, Vol.15, No.2 doi: 10.5376/amb.2025.15.0010 Received: 15 Feb., 2025 Accepted: 25 Mar., 2025 Published: 25 Apr., 2025 Copyright © 2025 Jiang and Li, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Jiang X.L., and Li M.M., 2025, Genetic variability and breeding strategies for key traits during Channa domestication, Animal Molecular Breeding, 15(2): 91-101 (doi: 10.5376/amb.2025.15.0010) Abstract Channa plays an important role in Asian aquaculture, but it faces many challenges in the process of transitioning from wild populations to artificial breeding, such as poor adaptability, strong aggressiveness, slow growth, and low reproductive efficiency. In recent years, many studies have been carried out at home and abroad on the domestication and genetic improvement of Channa, including growth traits, sex control, stress resistance and other aspects. Existing studies have shown that methods such as GWAS, genome selection, and transcriptome analysis have gradually been applied to the screening of key genes and traits; some studies have also explored breeding methods such as probiotic feeding, hormone induction, and interspecific hybridization. Studies have pointed out that artificial breeding may lead to a decrease in genetic diversity, which is also a direction that needs to be monitored in the future. This study clarified which key traits in the domestication of Channa deserve special attention, and also provided a genetic basis for the formulation of subsequent breeding strategies. Keywords Channadomestication; Genetic diversity; Trait improvement; Genomic selection; Breeding strategy 1 Introduction Channa spp., also known as black fish, is also called "snakehead fish". This fish is actually quite common in Asian waters. Especially in China, Vietnam, India and other places, the aquaculture industry relies heavily on it (Kumar et al., 2022). As a "bottom-dwelling omnivorous double-respiring fish", it has strong adaptability and can survive well in low-oxygen environments, mainly due to its "amphibious" breathing method. It grows fast, has a high protein content in its meat, and is very profitable to farm (Harrington et al., 2022; Cui et al., 2024). It is precisely because of these advantages that Channa has always been an important source of daily protein intake for people in areas where fish is the staple food. But to be honest, the domestication process of snakehead is not easy. As the global demand for high-quality aquatic products grows year by year, how to cultivate snakehead varieties that are more suitable for high-density farming, grow faster, and have strong disease resistance has become a common problem facing researchers and farmers (Cui et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2024). At present, many countries have launched selective breeding programs, but the problem is that it is not that simple to turn wild snakehead into "domestic fish". One prominent problem is that it is highly aggressive. Studies have found that the cannibalism rate of domesticated species in Vietnam during the hatching period is not low, reaching 40%-42%; and the wild population in the Mekong River in Cambodia is even more exaggerated, with a cannibalism rate of up to 57% (Nen et al., 2018). This kind of "cannibalism" behavior is a big challenge to aquaculture management. In addition to this, it is also not adaptable to the captive environment, such as slow growth, unstable reproduction, poor group performance, etc., which directly affect the progress of breeding (Cui et al., 2024). Ultimately, many traits are actually based on genetics. We have not yet fully understood which genes in snakehead fish are linked to which traits. Although some studies have begun to use tools such as genome-wide association
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