Fri, October 25, 2019 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS RESEARCH LABORATORY (AERL). IOF Seminar Series
Speaker: Gideon Mordecai
Postdoctoral Fellow, UBC
Location: AERL Theatre
The emergence of infectious agents poses a continual economic and environmental challenge to aquaculture production, yet the diversity, abundance and epidemiology of aquatic viruses is poorly characterized. In this seminar, I will show how genomic sequencing was applied to reveal that the same strain of Piscine Orthoreovirus (PRV) that infects farmed Atlantic salmon is associated with jaundice anemia in Chinook, and will discuss how the strain diversity of PRV has implications in recent policy decisions on testing for PRV in aquaculture hatcheries. Secondly, I will describe how we applied next generation sequencing to screen aquaculture fish for previously unidentified or emerging viruses. In-situ hybridization and high-throughput screening was used to determine the cell tropism and host range of these viruses. The study revealed viruses present in Atlantic salmon farms which have previously not been detected in British Columbia, and also detected some of the same viruses in pacific salmon, highlighting uncertainties in the risk of transmission of infectious agents between wild and farmed populations.