Optimization of insect production for animal feed through breeding

Insects for food and feed is an environmentally friendly and sustainable production form. The goal of this project is to provide the knowhow needed to optimize production of high quality protein based on insects and we hypothesize, that there is an enormous and unutilized potential to do this by genetic improvement through selective breeding. In this project we will screen numerus insect species and diet types to detect a species with high potential for production of protein, develop a sustainable breeding program for this species, select for important production traits and assess regions of the genome explaining variation in traits of interest. Our project is distributed into five work packages and is a collaborative effort involving scientists with relevant competences from Aalborg University, Aarhus University and colleagues from abroad, representing complementing expertise in arthropod physiology, evolutionary biology, and quantitative genetics and genomics.