Louis Bernatchez (Director)
Mélanie Dionne (Co-director)

The cultural heritage and economical importance of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) on both side of the Atlantic makes this species a great candidate for evolutionary biology studies. Its philopatric character and wide distribution across an heterogeneous environment offers a strong potential for local adaptations to settle in. Even though the demonstration of local adaptation would constitute a major contribution to the definition of management and conservation units, its existence in Atlantic salmon is still under debate. In this context, my project will have several objectives, aiming to (1) establish the neutral genetic structure of Atlantic salmon across its eastern Canadian distribution and using a landscape genetic approach, characterize population connectivity, (2) identify markers potentially under natural selection by genome scan and examine their distribution across the genome, (3) disentangle the effects of demographic processes, environmental factors and life history on neutral and potentially adaptive divergence using a novel landscape genomic approach and finally, (4) this project aims to determine the genomic basis of important sea mortality by integrating approaches used in objectives 2 and 3. Achieving these objectives should contribute significantly to improve knowledge of North American Atlantic salmon population genetics  and therefore be used as efficient information to delineate management and conservation units. Moreover, determining the genomic basis of sea mortality will yield important leads into a more comprehensive management of populations at different life stages. Ultimately, from a more fundamental point of view, combining different genomic resources and approaches offers a unique context towards the identification of the genomic basis of adaptive divergence and selective pressures underlying this divergence.