The SNP III Workshop started as an outreach initiative to transmit research results from Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation studies at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Science.  Industry sponsorships (Roche and Fluidigm) allowed us to greatly expand to provide a forum including guest speakers and participants from laboratories from around the world to gather, present papers, and exchange ideas on the rapidly developing discovery and application of SNPs for study of population genetics and genomics.  

We were able to publish twenty-three papers that covered the broad array of topics in a supplemental issue of Molecular Ecology Resources.  SNPs are rapidly becoming the genetic marker of choice in many studies of ecology, population structure, and especially fisheries conservation and management.  In addition, SNPS are increasingly being used to understand the relationship between the phenotype and the genotype in evolutionary studies.  Researchers involved in genome mapping and QTL detection, population genomics, and whole genome association analyses are utilizing SNPs to obtain sufficient coverage of the genome.  Also, transportability of SNP data has enabled multinational collaborations on pelagic fish species that undergo long migrations, where the ease of data standardization across laboratories and different genotyping platforms makes SNPs ideal for constructing species-wide data bases.  

Participants shared progress on research topics funded by and important to the Pacific Salmon Commission, the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission,  FishPopTrace, and Washington Sea Grant.