 | New Virus Threatening Tilapia Stocks Discovered |
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13 April 2016 http://www.thefishsite.com/ ANALYSIS - An international team of researchers has identified and characterised a new virus - tilapia lake virus (TiLV), which caused huge mortality of farmed tilapia in Israel and Ecuador. The scientific team, led by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and Tel Aviv University, used high-throughput sequencing to determine the genetic code of the virus from tissue taken from diseased fish. However, the resulting DNA sequences didn't match any known virus. "The TiLV sequence has only minimal similarity in a small region of its genome to other viruses; thus, the methods we typically use to identify and characterise viruses through sequencing alone were insufficient," says first author Eran Bacharach, a molecular virologist at Tel Aviv University. "It appears to be most closely related to a family of influenza viruses called orthomyxoviruses; however, we still don't understand much about its biology," adds Nischay Mishra, associate research scientist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia's Mailman School. In other news, salmon farmers around the world using sea lice treatments containing azamethiphos will now be able to export their fish to the US thanks to years of hard work by Fish Vet Group (FVG). Fish Vet Group has worked closely with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for many years to obtain the Import Tolerance for azamethiphos, the active ingredient in Benchmark’s sea lice treatments, Salmosan®, Salmosan®Vet and Byelice®. Weekly Overview: New Virus Threatening Tilapia Stocks Discovered |
