Arturo Sánchez-Paz

• Ph. D.
• Senior Researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste S.C.

Regulation of the expression of trypsin encoding genes in juveniles white shrimp (Penaeus vannamei) was studied during starvation for up to 120 h. Since molting is now recognized as a physiologically important process in penaeids, specimens were selected according to molt stage. Starvation led to immediate weight loss and a sharp decrease in hepato...

White spot syndrome virus (WSSV), the sole member of the monotypic family Nimaviridae, is considered an extremely lethal shrimp pathogen. Despite its impact, some essential biological characteristics related to WSSV genome dynamics, such as the synonymous codon usage pattern and selection pressure in genes, remain to be elucidated. The results show...

The aquaculture industry around the world has experienced an explosive growth during the last two decades. The contribution of aquaculture to the total seafood supply has far outstripped the projections made by FAO in 1995.

Given its high prevalence, its wide distribution and its remarkable capacity to cause severe mortality in shrimp, the infectious hypodermal and haematopoietic necrosis virus (IHHNV) may deserve far more attention than it has received, as it remains considered as one of the most serious problems plaguing the global shrimp farming industry. Furthermo...

Viruses are ubiquitous and extremely abundant in the marine environment. One of such marine viruses, the white spot syndrome virus (WSSV), has emerged globally as one of the most prevalent, widespread and lethal for shrimp populations. However, at present there is no treatment available to interfere with the unrestrained occurrence and spread of th...

Las microalgas recombinantes como una poderosa herramienta contra enfermedades en especies de interés acuícola Introducción La mayoría de las personas sabe que las plantas son organismos que llevan a cabo la importante labor de transformar el dióxido de carbono a oxígeno, pero lo que muchos no saben es que existen pequeños microorganismos que reali...

During their long evolutionary history, jellyfish have faced changes in multiple environmental factors, to which they may selectively fix adaptations, allowing some species to survive and inhabit diverse environments. Previous findings have confirmed the jellyfish’s ability to synthesize large ATP amounts, mainly produced by mitochondria, in respon...

In this study, the primers of different protocols for the detection of White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) were analyzed in silico to evaluate their potential performance in PCR. As with any biological entity, this virus evolves constantly. Thus, this analysis showed that a few primers, including those recommended by the World Organization for Animal...

Viral diseases are the most serious threat to the expansion and development of shrimp aquaculture. Rapid diagnosis of the white spot syndrome virus (WSSV), a lethal shrimp pathogen, is essential to restrict its spread and reduce the mortality of infected shrimp. This virus has globally affected the shrimp farming industry, with a devastating econom...

The global industrial farming of the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) has faced significant losses in production and a major negative social impact due to the occurrence of massive mortalities putatively attributed to the Ostreid Herpesvirus-1 (OsHV-1). Therefore, therapies based on RNA interference (RNAi), including the small hairpin RNAs (shRNA...

The white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is a highly lethal pathogen for several crustacean species, which implies that this virus has caused high mortalities and significant economic losses for the global shrimp aquaculture industry. Viruses’ entry into the host cell depends on the interaction between those proteins located on the surface of the virus...

During their long evolutionary history, jellyfish have faced changes in multiple environmental factors, to which they may selectively fix adaptations allowing some species to survive and inhabit diverse environments. Previous findings have confirmed the jellyfish’s ability to synthesize large ATP amounts, mainly produced by mitochondria, in respons...

Aims: The present study evaluated the effect of four functional diets and a reference diet on the survival and intestinal bacterial community of shrimp Penaeus vannamei infected with AHPND. Methods and results: After 42 days of feeding trail, shrimp were inoculated with a Vibrio parahaemolyticus (CIB-0018-3) carrying the plasmid encoding for the...

The White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) is one of the most lethal pathogens in the shrimp aquaculture industry. Therefore, several studies have focused on developing alternatives to reduce its negative effects. Different functional feeds have been probed to enhance survival against WSSV infection by improving shrimp health condition. This study evalua...

The brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus), a well-recognized parasite that is an important vector of many pathogens, widely distributed in the world, can be found in dogs and many other host animals, including humans. However, the response of this species to climate changes is not fully understood yet. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the...

In most eukaryotic organisms, mitochondrial uncoupling mechanisms control ATP synthesis and reactive oxygen species production. One such mechanism is the permeability transition of the mitochondrial inner membrane. In mammals, ischemia–reperfusion events or viral diseases may induce ionic disturbances, such as calcium overload; this cation enters t...

Na aquicultura, a educação e o acesso ao conhecimento são críticos, e são as ferramentas que permitem aos aquicultores adquirir e usar informação para melhorias na produção. Este trabalho reúne dados de pesquisas realizadas previamente e disponíveis nos aplicativos Aquasaúde e Aquatilápia, de forma que o leitor possa ter as informações disponíveis...

The cannonball jellyfish Stomolophus meleagris display colour variations from blue to purple, and different pigmentation patterns on the umbrella surface. Although these colour phenotypes are common in this organism, surprisingly, little is known about the causes and the adaptive significance of these polymorphisms. In this study, we investigated t...

Jellyfish are non-model organisms that have brought the scientific community's attention over the last decades since the frequency and intensity of these species blooms around the world have increased significantly. The occurrence of blooms has been hypothesized due to the rise in seawater temperature associated with climate change. This fact has p...

Shrimp farming is considered the fastest growing aquaculture industry in the last decades, with an average growth in production of ~15% per year. Unfortunately, this industry has been affected by the emergence of viral diseases, and currently, there are no commercially available therapeutics against these pathogens. Therefore, a deeper understandin...

The white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is a highly lethal and contagious pathogen to most cultivated shrimp species. The WSSV genome contains the ICP11 gene and its encoded protein acts as a multifunctinal DNA mimic protein that disrupts the nucleosome assembly by binding to the histone proteins H2A and H3. In addition, WSSV provokes severe nuclear h...

The white spot syndrome virus (WSSV), the most lethal pathogen of shrimp, is a dsDNA virus with approximately a 300,000 base pairs and contains approximately 180-500 predicted open reading frames (ORFs), of which only 6% show homology to any known protein from other viruses or organisms. Although most of its ORFs encode enzymes for nucleotide metab...

Hsp70 proteins are widely found through several species, and they are considered among the most conservative proteins in nature, in both their sequence and function. They play an important role in the response mechanism to several different kinds of stress such as temperature and pathogens among others. In some species, the variations in the sequen...

Thymidylate synthase (TS, E.C. 2.1.1.45) is a crucial enzyme for de novo deoxythymidine monophosphate (dTMP) biosynthesis. The gene for this enzyme is thyA , which encodes the folate-dependent TS that converts deoxyuridine monophosphate group (dUMP) into (dTMP) using the cofactor 5,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate (mTHF) as a carbon donor. We identifie...

Sequence alignment of TS amino acid sequences Members of the VAAP clade (Vibrionales, Alteromonadales, Aeromonadales, and Pasteurellales) are colored in orange. E. coli TS sequence was included for reference and is colored in blue. Invariant residues are highlighted in yellow across species, while positions that change in VAAP with respect to other...

List of genome GenBank accession number used to obtain the thymidylate synthase gene sequences

The world production in aquaculture increased to 100 million tonsin 2014, and it is responsible for ensuring the subsistence of 12% ofthe world’s population (FAO, 2016). Brazil is the second largestaquaculture producer among Latin American countries, with a rapidgrowth production from 172.5 thousand tons in 2011 to 629.3thousand tons in 2014 (FAO,...

Palaemonetes argentinus, an abundant freshwater prawn species in the northern and central region of Argentina, has been used as a bioindicator of environmental pollutants as it displays a very high sensitivity to pollutants exposure. Despite their extraordinary ecological relevance, a lack of genomic information has hindered a more thorough underst...

The Ostreid herpes virus type 1 (OsHV-1) is one of the most devastating pathogen in oyster cultures. Among several factors, as food limitation, oxygen depletion, salinity and temperature variations, episodes of "summer mortality" of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas have also been associated with OsHV-1 infection. Mortalities of C. gigas spat an...

Crustaceans are intensively farmed in aquaculture facilities where they are vulnerable to parasites, bacteria, or viruses, often severely compromising the rearing success. The ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) is crucial for the maintenance of cellular integrity. Analogous to higher vertebrates, the UPS of crustaceans may also play an important rol...

The shrimp necrotizing hepatopancreatitis is caused by a pleomorphic Gram-negative Rickettsia-like bacteria known as NHP-B. It is well known that silver is an effective bactericidal, but experiments with aquatic organisms are scarce, even more at nanoparticle level. The objective of this study was to determine the antibacterial effect of silver nan...

Beyond their ability to infect and spread, viruses lack the ability to replicate by their own. To counter this, viruses have evolved strategies to exploit the host’s machinery for the production of new virions. However, viruses are by no means merely passive consumers of host metabolic products. Viruses induce remarkable changes in their host’s cel...

The decapod Penstyldensovirus 1 (PstDV-1) represents one of the most serious threats for penaeid shrimp farming. Studies aimed at defining relevant molecular effects of this virus over its host are imperative in the attempt to increase our understanding of its pathogenesis. Unfortunately, few studies have focused on the definition of the expression...

The decapod penstyldensovirus (PstDV1) is a widely spread shrimp pathogen that causes high mortalities in the shrimp Penaeus stylirostris, while in P. vannamei, it has been associated with induction of the runt deformity syndrome. Using shrimp post-larvae (PL, stages PL13-PL21) collected from 16 commercial hatcheries from Mexico, and a sensitive PC...

The physiological and immune responses of adult shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) undergoing the acute phase of the necrotizing hepatopancreatitis (NHP) disease and the efficiency of oxytetracycline (OXI) and florfenicol (FF) to eliminate the pathogen were evaluated. Four shrimp groups were considered: three groups infected with necrotizing hepatopancr...

The physiological and immune responses of adult shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) undergoing the acute phase of the necrotizing hepatopancreatitis (NHP) disease and the efficiency of oxytetracycline (OXI) and florfenicol (FF) to eliminate the pathogen were evaluated. Four shrimp groups were considered: three groups infected with necrotizing hepatopancr...

The HSP70 proteins are an important element of the response against thermal stress and infectious diseases, and they are highly conserved and ubiquitous. In some species, variations on the hsp70 encoding sequence resulted in intraspecific differential expression, which leads to variations on thermo-tolerance among individuals. This phenomenon has n...

Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) belongs to the aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDH) family, an ancestral group of enzymes responsible for aldehyde detoxification in several organisms. The BADH enzyme catalyzes the irreversible oxidation of betaine aldehyde to glycine betaine (GB) an important osmoptrotector and osmoregulator accumulated in response...

Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) belongs to the aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDH) family, an ancestral group of enzymes responsible for aldehyde detoxification in several organisms. The BADH enzyme catalyzes the irreversible oxidation of betaine aldehyde to glycine betaine (GB) an important osmoptrotector and osmoregulator accumulated in response...

The Penaeus stylirostris densovirus (PstDV) (also known as Infectious hypodermal and hematopoietic necrosis virus, IHHNV), one of the major shrimp pathogens, has a worldwide distribution in farmed and wild shrimp populations. Outbreaks of IHHNV have been associated with substantial economic losses which are accompanied by a negative social impact....

Cytochrome c oxidase (COX), which is located in the inner membrane of mitochondria, is a key constituent of the electron transport chain that catalyzes the reduction of oxygen. The Pacific whiteleg shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei is constantly exposed to hypoxic conditions, which affects both the central metabolism and the mitochondrial function. The p...

Marine viruses are ubiquitous, extremely diverse, and outnumber any form of life in the sea. Despite their ecological importance, viruses in marine environments have been largely ignored by the academic community, and only those that have caused substantial economic losses have received more attention. Fortunately, our current understanding on mari...

The white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is a lethal and contagious pathogen for penaeid shrimp and a growing number of other crustacean species. To date, there are no effective prophylactic or therapeutic treatments commercially available to interfere with the occurrence and spread of the disease. In addition, the significance of alternative vectors o...

The susceptibility of the endemic copepod Calanus pacificus californicus to white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) was established by the temporal analysis of WSSV VP28 transcripts by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR). The copepods were collected from a shrimp pond located in Bahia de Kino Sonora, Mexico, and challenged per os with WSSV by a virus–phy...

Background The White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV), the sole member of the family Whispoviridae, is the etiological agent that causes severe mortality events in wild and farmed shrimp globally. Given its adverse effects, the WSSV has been included in the list of notifiable diseases of the Office of International Epizootic (OIE) since 1997. To date the...

The presence of a shrimp necrotizing hepatopancreatitis bacterium (NHP) in zooplankton samples from the Gulf of California was confirmed by qPCR and DNA sequences analysis. Samples of zooplankton were collected from stations located on the eastern shore of the Gulf of California, an area adjacent geographically to the coast of Sonora, Mexico. Three...

The Infectious Hypodermal and Hematopoietic Necrosis Virus (IHHNV) is a single-stranded DNA virus that infects several penaeid shrimp species, provoking economic losses in farmed shrimp populations estimated at several million of dollars. Furthermore, IHHNV has historically been considered an important threat for wild shrimp populations, but its re...

The aquaculture industry around the world has experienced an explosive growth during the last two decades. The contribution of aquaculture to the total seafood supply has far outstripped the projections made by FAO in 1995. Today, the practice of farming aquatic animals has expanded so rapidly that it has become one of the major global industries....

Crustaceans commonly experience starvation periods due to natural food scarcity and during molting. Several physiological, metabolic and behavioral changes have been associated with starvation in these animals. Traditionally, protein was assumed as the main energy source for crustaceans; however, new findings indicate that carbohydrates reserves in...

Food protein hydrolysis, a crucial step in digestion, is catalyzed by trypsin enzymes from the digestive apparatus of invertebrates. Trypsin appeared early in evolution and occurs in all phyla and, in the digestive systems of invertebrates, it became the most abundant proteinase. As in vertebrates, invertebrate trypsin is also present in several fo...

Crustaceans are forced to fast during molting. Several physiological, metabolic and behavioral changes have been associated with starvation. Although some of these changes have been well studied, knowledge of the dynamics of fuel reserves during the molting process is limited. To understand the effects of short-term hunger stress on energy reserves...

In this paper, we review the current knowledge about the usage of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins as energy source by marine crustaceans during starvation. Crustaceans are a large and diverse group including some economically important species. The efforts to culture them for human consumption has prompted the interest to understand the preferen...

A high density lipoprotein-beta glucan binding protein (HDL-BGBP) is synthesized in the hepatopancreas of the white shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei and secreted to the hemolymph. Recently, we reported the HDL-BGBP full length cDNA sequence and found that the predicted polypeptide is larger than the mature protein and also, that it contains a long 5'- a...

Protein food modulates the activity of proteases of the midgut gland of Penaeus vannamei. Shrimp fed with food containing 15, 30 and 50% protein exhibited differences in trypsin and chymotrypsin activity and trypsin mRNA levels. Shrimp fed with 30% protein showed higher trypsin and chymotrypsin activities than those fed 15 or 50% protein. An additi...

Previously considered as toxin-free, the Baja California Peninsula has witnessed several toxic algal blooms during the past three years. Apparently these ‘red-tide’ phenomena's outbreaks are not linked to any human related activity. This may just reflect better detection and training. Such events may be periodical and natural rather than induced. T...

In this paper, we review the current knowledge about the usage of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins as energy source by marine crustaceans during starvation. Crustaceans are a large and diverse group including some economically important species. The efforts to culture them for human consumption has prompted the interest to understand the preferen...