What Can Genetics Do for the Control of Infectious Diseases in Aquaculture?

Abstract

Infectious diseases place an economic burden on aquaculture and a limitation to its growth. An innovative approach to mitigate their impact on production is breeding for disease resistance: selection for domestication, family-based selection, marker-assisted selection, and more recently, genomic selection. Advances in genetics and genomics approaches to the control of infectious diseases are key to increasing aquaculture efficiency, profitability, and sustainability and to reducing its environmental footprint. Interaction and co-evolution between a host and pathogen can, however, turn breeding to boost infectious disease resistance into a potential driver of pathogenic change. Parallel molecular characterization of the pathogen and its virulence and antimicrobial resistance genes is therefore essential to understand pathogen evolution over time in response to host immunity, and to apply appropriate mitigation strategies.

16S-23S rRNA Internal Transcribed Spacer Region (ITS) Sequencing: A Potential Molecular Diagnostic Tool for Differentiating Lactococcus garvieae and Lactococcus petauri

“…Advantages in molecular methods have provided a novel set of tools that characterize pathogens in ever greater detail [ 9 ]. The 16S rRNA gene has been widely used in medical microbiology to identify bacteria [ 10 ].…”

Exploring the genetic diversity of Edwardsiella ictaluri in Vietnamese striped catfish (Pangasianodon hypophthalmus) farms over a 20-year period

“…Epidemiological investigation of disease outbreaks is vital to inform health management policies, as it provides criteria on which to base surveillance and vaccination programmes. Whilst alternative high-resolution methods are available for bacterial identification (e.g., whole genome sequencing), pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) is considered the gold-standard of genotyping methods for molecular characterisation and to determine the genetic relatedness of bacterial isolates during disease outbreaks, due to its low cost, high discriminatory power, reproducibility and ease of interpretation (Duman et al, 2022;Ramadan, 2022;Sciuto et al, 2022). Indeed, this method has been used previously to type several aquatic bacterial pathogens including Aeromonas salmonicida subsp.…”