Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND
19 WOODWARD HALL 9 EAST ALUMNI AVENUE
KINGSTON,RI 02881
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The eastern oyster,Crassostrea virginica,is a major source of economic and ecological value to the United States as both a food source and through the ecosystem services they provide. However, the eastern oyster suffers from a range of diseases thatnot only impact specific lifestages of an individual, but also impede distinct lines of production for our aquaculture industry. Unfortunately, current disease management strategies are often reactive, occurring once disease has already spread within hatcheries, nurseries, and farms.This reactive approach leaveslittle time for hatchery managers to act or even save their stock, whichultimatelystallslines of oyster production anddelays incoming revenue. To prevent further economic losses, it is essential to explore preventative, as opposed to reactive, disease management strategies that target harmful pathogens for specific lifestages of interest before disease spread occurs. This project takes a preventative disease management approach by "priming" the eastern oyster prior to the emergence of disease with treatments that stimulate the oyster immune system. After quantifying the impact of these treatments on the total infection an individual oyster has, as well as its ability to survive the infection, we can determine not only if protection is offered, but also if protection is specific to distinct pathogen types. Theoutcomes of this project willsupport the bivalve shellfish industry through targeted disease control and take a novel approach toalleviate the economicburden suffered from oyster aquaculturelosses. This will ultimately lead to improved aquaculture production at local, regional, and national scales, providinggreater resilience for our oyster producers.
Animal Health Component
30%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
70%
Applied
30%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The majorgoal of this project is to investigatea key phenomenon found in invertebrates that may be leveraged in disease managment contexts for the aquaculture industry. This phenomenon, called "immune priming", has the potential to be exploited for the oyster industry to prevent substantial economic losses and maintain an adequate and safe food supply. To achieve this goal, three specific objectives will be investigated: 1)Larval immune priming defense against pathogenic Vibrio spp. 2) Juvenile immune priming defense against pathogenic Aliiroseovarius crassotreae 3) Adult immune priming defense against pathogenic Perkinsus spp. The outcomes of this project will not only provide insight of interest to both public and private stakeholders, but concentrating research efforts on these distinct lines of oyster productionensures food security and resilience for our local and regional producers.
Project Methods
At distinct lifestages (i.e., larval, juvenile, adult), oysters will be subjected to an experimental regime that primes anindividual's immune defensewith a treatment that either matches or mismatches the subsequent live pathogen they receive. This matched and mistmatched exposure regime allows us to disentangle if treatments provide broad or specific protection against virulent pathogens of interest. Following experimental exposures, oysters will be assessedfor infection intensity quantification to determine the individual's ability to rapidly clear the infection based on the treatments they receive. Otherindividuals will be left alone to track the impact of treatment on survival. All life stage-specific experiments will be repeated twice (i.e., once each season). Repeating the experiment will account for the potential bias of environmental variation caused by using seawater in hatcheries, nurseries, and grow-out farms for the experimental regimedescribed. All statistical analyses will be performed in R Studio. Mixed effects cox proportional hazards models will be fitted for analysis of longevity using the coxme package in R Studio. Models including the priming treatment and secondary pathogen exposure will be coded as main effects, as well as their interaction, and block (i.e., repeated experiments each season) will be treated as a random effect. Infection intensity will be analyzed with a generalized linear mixed model fitted with a negative binomial distribution to account for overdispersion. All responses will be investigated for adherence to model assumptions and the fit of the model. Support for the overarching hypothesis of this work would be a significant difference between matched and mismatched priming/pathogen treatment combinations within each lifestage. This would suggest that there is specificity in the protection offered through immune priming. As a practical outcome of this work, we can determine how specific and/or nonspecific immune priming defense may be for disease management contexts.