Experimental evidence for white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) susceptibility linked to a microsatellite DNA marker in giant black tiger shrimp, Penaeus monodon (Fabricius)

摘要

White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is the causative agent of a severe shrimp viral disease called white spot disease (WSD) which surpasses all other disease agents as the principal cause of production losses in the shrimp aquaculture industry (Flegel 1997). WSSV is a rod-shaped dsDNA virus of 305,107 bp length which belongs to the genus Whispovirus of the family Nimaviridae (Durand et al. 1997). Since 1992, this disease has caused huge mortalities; up to 90-99% of a total population usually dies within 3-5 days of infection (Lightner & Redman 1998) and it has severely impacted on the economy in most of the shrimp farming regions of Asia including India. Various approaches, such as cutting off the pathways for transmission of infection (He et al. 2003), use of chemical or herbal immunostimulant (Rameshthangam & Ramasamy 2007; Citarasu et al. 2006), use of dsRNA injection (Kim et al. 2007) and vaccination (Witteveldt et al. 2004), are used to control WSSV. However, WSD is still the most signicant disease in penaeid shrimp culture, and the above-mentioned methods are not adequately effective to control it.