Best Paper in the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health

Fishy Fridays

Weekly spotlight on fisheries science journal articles

 

Jeff Kopaska
AFS Executive Director
jkopaska@fisheries.org

Today’s paper is the 2024 Best Paper Award winner from the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health.  There are multiple things addressed in this paper that I am in no way informed enough to provide relevant commentary.  However, I believe there is a really cool take home message here – see a challenge, find a better solution. In this case, there is a virus that affects shrimp populations, and the presence of this virus is regulated internationally in shrimp aquaculture. “The existing disease identification approach is time consuming, necessitates expensive equipment, and requires specialized expertise, thereby limiting the accessibility of shrimp disease screening on farms.” The article outlines a new methodology that is cost-effective, versatile, and uses simpler equipment.  Reading about this reminded me of my days in a water lab. Atrazine was likely present everywhere in Iowa’s water, but I did not have ready access to a GC-Mass Spec, or the funding to run multiple samples. ELISA immunoassays were relatively new at the time, and allowed simple and cost-effective measurement of chemicals like atrazine. The binding of the atrazine particle to an antibody caused color development in the water sample, which could be easily measured and quantified by light transmission.  Now, I don’t know a thing about loop-mediated isothermal amplification, but when you do it, and the DNA you seek is present, a reaction happens.  That reaction causes the precipitation of magnesium pyrophosphate, and measuring the change in light transmission via a simple turbidimeter can tell you if and how much of the virus DNA is present. These folks identified a challenging situation and developed something new to address it. Great work!

Real‐time triplex loop‐mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) using a turbidimeter for detection of shrimp infectious hypodermal and hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHHNV) (free access)