Liang Chen , Rudi Mai

Tropical Marine Fisheries Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 5   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2025.15.0021
Received: 26 Jun., 2025    Accepted: 28 Aug., 2025    Published: 10 Sep., 2025

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.

Chen L., and Mai R.D., 2025, Structural variations in the oyster genome and their role in environmental adaptation, International Journal of Marine Science, 15(5): 233-244 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2025.15.0021)

Oysters play a key role in the ecosystem and are also an important breeding shellfish, but their living environment faces multiple pressures such as salinity and temperature. Research in recent years has found that structural variants (SVs) are widely present in the oyster genome, including deletion, insertion, inversion, translocation and replication of large fragments. These structural variations not only increase the genetic diversity of oyster populations, but also play an important role in the environmental adaptive evolution of oysters by affecting gene dose and gene regulation. Based on the review of the characteristics of oyster genomes, this study focuses on discussing the types of genome structural variants, detection technology and their distribution characteristics in the oyster genome. Combined with environmental stress cases such as high salt, low oxygen and high temperature, it explains how structural variants affect gene expression and physiological phenotypes, thereby promoting the adaptation of oysters to environmental changes. Finally, the application prospects of oyster genome structural variation research in aquatic breeding, environmental monitoring and gene editing are prospected.

Oysters; Genomic structural mutation; Environmental adaptation; High salt stress; High temperature stress