The Auburn University Aquaculture Genetics Program has an 80-year history with focused efforts on geneticsand breeding, transgenic technology and genomics being initiated 43, 27 and 18 years ago. This resulted in thefirst successful selection experiments for channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, the basis of the monosex tilapia industry,the first production of transgenic fish in the US, major advances in catfish genomics and the first productionof a xenogenic catfish. The most significant impact has been the establishment of the technology to allow ahybrid catfish industry, which produced 150 million hybrid catfish fry in 2012.