GROSS, P.S.; Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, S.C.: Functional genomics approaches to understanding stress responses and disease in shrimp

Pathogens in the marine environment have caused catastrophic losses to shrimp aquaculture. The manner in which marine crustaceans respond to pathogens is complex and largely unknown. In addition, the role of anthropogenic and natural factors in the etiology of shrimp disease and their effects on immunity is, at best, poorly understood. This is particularly true in the case of antiviral immunity for which there is virtually nothing known about host resistance. We have taken a functional genomics approach to gain an understanding of the underlying genetics of disease response and immunity in crustaceans, using the Pacific white shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei and White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) as models. The Pacific white shrimp is a commonly aquacultured species in many parts of the world and WSSV has had a devastating effect on farms growing the Pacific white shrimp. The strategy employed relies on the discovery of novel genes with putative roles in immune response using of ESTs derived from standard and redundancy depleted cDNA libraries and to a lesser extent enriched disease-responsive libraries generated by suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH). In addition, these cDNA clones are being used to generate microarrays to examine disease response in detail. We hypothesize that infection triggers changes in gene expression that are at least partially reflective of an immune response. By characterizing these disease-responsive genes, we aim to gain an understanding about the kinds of pathways involved in the invertebrate antiviral defense.