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-: So Aquaculture is the practice of growing
and farming aquatic species.
This can be anything from plants such as algae.
All the way up to larger organisms such as
fish, mussels, shrimp.
As well as many others.
This is also an ancient practice
that dates back to 6000 BC
and has been widely used by different cultures
through out time.
However it wasn't until the 1960 that it really started
to show up in Mississippi as a food industry.
It would take another 20 years or so
before it really became popular.
So one of the major problems is,
because this industry is still in its infancy
in the United States we're still going through
a lot of growing pains.
One of the major problems is that as we continue to
increase production by stocking more fish into these ponds
we're also increasing the number of diseases we have
as well as the number of outbreaks
that we have to deal with each year.
As many of you might know
Mississippi is a major producer of Catfish.
In fact 60 to 70 percent of all Catfish produced in
the United States is produced in Mississippi alone.
So my research is focused on one of these diseases
in particular that's having a detrimental effect
on the Mississippi industry.
This disease causes major clinical signs such as,
discolorations as well as hemorrhaging in or around
the eyes which you can see in this bottom picture.
In addition to this it can also create these
massive die offs, where a single farm may lose
20 thousands pounds of fish or more
in the course of a weekend.
So it can be extremely detrimental
in a very short amount of time.
The question we really wanted to answer early on
was exactly what disease strain we're working with.
If we're going to start working toward vaccines
or other treatments we need to know
what we're trying to treat.
What we do is actually go out to the farms
during an outbreak.
We take swabs from these fish.
We bring them back to the lab
and we can actually isolate that bacterial DNA.
Once we have that we put it through a PCR
so it creates millions and millions of copies
of this DNA so that we can start to analyze it.
Once we have these copies
we can run it through a gel,
which you can see in this middle picture.
What we're looking for is where these white bands show up.
The placement of those white bands tells us exactly
what strain of the disease we're working with.
One of the major things that we have found so far
is that since this disease was first isolated
in the Delta in 2013, we've seen a complete shift
from the original strain to a brand new strain
in just five years.
This has important implications
because if we start to create treatments or vaccines
based on this original strain,
there's no guarantee that they will work on this new strain.
As I mentioned Mississippi produces over 60%
of Catfish in the United States.
So anything that effects our local economy,
will likely have a ripple effect in to both
national and global economies as well.
Thank you.
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