A novel diagnostic SNP panel for fishery management of green abalone (Haliotis fulgens).

The green abalone (Haliotis fulgens) represents an important artisanal fishery in the Northwest Pacific in Mexico but with populations below the optimum recovery level. Illegal fishing and the potential impact on wild populations because of the stock enhancement programs would benefit from a genomic tool to discriminate among populations and provide traceability. In this study, SNP panels for green abalone were developed from ddRad-seq data and used to evaluate individual assignment accuracy at two hierarchical scales. One included three genetic groups: 1) Guadalupe Island (GI), 2) Northern Coastal Group (NCG) and 3) Southern Coastal Group (SCG); and the second only the two coastal groups. Eight SNP panels (from 50 to 1000 loci), with markers ranked by FST, were evaluated to assess the power to identify individuals from the three genetic groups at both scales. The predictive model found high discriminatory power for almost all the SNP datasets for two of the three groups (GI and SCG), ranging from 0.72 (s.d. = 0.32) to 1. At the coastal scale, assignment accuracies for NCG individuals varied substantially with the number of SNP markers, ranging from 0.01 (s.d. = 0.05) with the 50 most informative SNPs to 0.79 (s.d. = 0.30) using 1000 SNPs. These SNP panels will provide genetic tools for tracing the origin of green abalone in the food-supply chain, which will assist fishing cooperatives in certifying their products and tackling illegal fishing in México.