Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Fish represent one of the most healthy sources of food in the world; yet, capture fisheries are declining. In the future, aquaculture will likely supply most fish. As a result, fish farming has become a valuable economic activity, but maintaining aquaculture is challenging. One challenge is emerging viral diseases. An example for Atlantic salmon (AS) is heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI). The causative agent is thought to be piscine reovirus (PRV). PRV reproduces only marginally in vitro and only in 1 cell line, preventing easy diagnosis, virus isolation and vaccine preparation. Therefore, this proposal has 5 interacting goals. The 1st is to develop AS cell lines from hearts and blood cell producing cultures from spleens. Viruses need cells in order to replicate but are selective as to what cells they will replicate in and reveal themselves. Two potential replication sites for PRV are cardiac cells and blood cells. Cell lines can be cryopreserved, providing stable reagents to study emerging viral diseases in the future. The 2nd is to identify the best cell cultures for studying viruses of HSMI. The cell lines will be the new ones plus existing ones from a range of fish and tissues. The test material will be samples from fish with HSMI. The 3rd is varying sample preparation and exposure conditions to improve viral detection by cell cultures. The 4th goal will be to optimize a diagnostic tool that can be used specifically in this research for goals 2 to 5 and generally to study HSMI. This is the polymerase chain reaction to quantify the amount of virus in cultures and in fish. Finally, cell lines will be used to produce PRV so that fish can be exposed and the causal relationship between PRV and HSMI tested and pathogenesis of the disease described.If PRV causes HMSI, vaccines could be developed, and these could become valuable commercial products for our partner, a pharmaceutical company.