Sonja Saksida's research while affiliated with BC Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences and other places

... In recent times, intensification of aquaculture practices requires proper understanding of various fish diseases to prevent them from causing heavy financial loss due to mass mortalities [1]. The prevalence of pathogenic and opportunistic bacteria in aquaculture system of Indian major carps is directly related to rearing methods, environmental conditions and variations of several extrinsic factors [2,3]. ...

... Atlantic salmon have experienced significant genetic bottlenecking on a global scale likely due to their role as key species within global aquaculture. Recent studies showed that there tended to be a deficiency of homozygous individuals in the populations that had been exposed to and survived the M74 syndrome in Norwegian populations [13,14]. This indicates a tendency for selection against homozygotes during exposure to the syndrome, and that natural selection may favor heterozygous individuals [13,14]. ...

... At present, the rate at which WSSV outbreaks have reached places that were deemed as WSSV free zones is alarming and of great concern [13,14]. However, transmission of WSSV through water is probably the major route of entry into the culture system hence, regular monitoring by checking the water before pumping into ponds for managing the WSSV entry is very much essential [15][16][17]. Passive diagnosis of viruses in sick animals using molecular tools cannot predict future outbreaks hence; the study of the epidemiology of viruses in the environmental water becomes imperative. However, the bottleneck to virus detection in environmental water is that their copy numbers are extremely low and can hardly be detected by conventional PCR, thus concentrating virus particles should become obligatory prior to their detection [18][19][20][21]. ...

... To date, only the PRV-1a substrain has been detected in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, where it infects both farmed Atlantic salmon and wild Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.; Kibenge et al. 2013;Siah et al. 2015Siah et al. , 2020Morton et al. 2017;Di Cicco et al. 2018;Purcell et al. 2018;. Recent and comprehensive analyses of PRV-1 diversity concluded that all the circulating sequence isolates in the Eastern Pacific appear to descend from a single introduction event approximately 30 years ago . ...

... Atlantic salmon are also farmed on Canada's west coast, where emamectin benzoate has been the dominant louse control strategy since 1999 (Saksida et al. 2011;Messmer et al. 2018). Despite this, there has been minimal evidence of lice in the Pacific evolving resistance (Saksida et al. 2013), at least until very recently (Messmer et al. 2018). ...

... Atlantic salmon has been reported in the laboratory, with Atlantic salmon highly susceptible to IHNV infection through both cohabita- tion and bath exposure (Saksida et al., 2015; Traxler, Roome, & Kent, 1997). IHNV has also been a major health issue for farmed Atlantic salmon in BC, when its commercialized farming started in the prov- ince in1985(Armstrong, Robinson, Rymes, & Needham, 1993Dixon et al., 2016; Knapp, Roheim, & Anderson, 2016;St-Hilaire, Ribble, Traxler, Ribble, Traxler, Davies, & Kent, 2001). ...

... For instance, in a challenge study in BC, PRV-1a was associated with mild to moderate lesions in Atlantic salmon (Polinski et al. 2019), and in a separate epidemiological study, heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI) was reported on Atlantic salmon farms in BC (Di Cicco et al. 2017). Important to the potential risk posed to wild Pacific salmon, PRV-1a has been associated with mild heart lesions in sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) and Chinook salmon (Garver et al. 2016), jaundice/anemia in farmed Chinook (Di Cicco et al. 2018), and lesions consistent with jaundice/anemia in wild Chinook salmon (Wang 2018) (although we note that due to the nature of these studies the etiological role of PRV in these lesions has not been determined). Other challenge studies of PRV-1 in Chinook salmon resulted in mild disease lesions and changes to the hematocrit of infected individuals . ...

... Atlantic salmon are the most economically important farmed fish in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2021), as well as some other nations. Various diseases pose a great threat to productivity and fish welfare in Atlantic salmon farms (Asche et al., 2009;Lafferty et al., 2015). For example, infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAv) causes ISA and associated mortalities in Atlantic salmon farms in Chile, Norway, Canada, USA, and UK (Cottet et al., 2011;McBeath et al., 2007). ...

... It has been shown to counteract the effects of temperature and endogenous nucleases present in the tissues (Gorokhova, 2005), thereby preserving nucleic acids without a need for freezing. Since commercial RNAlater® is relatively expensive, a homemade version equivalent of RNAlater® (Passow et al., 2019) and concentrated ethanol (Siah et al., 2014) can be applied to protect RNA degradation in tissue samples for short-term storage. Alternatively, Whatman® FTA® cards have been reported to sufficiently preserve RNA viruses for specific durations. ...

... Renogen + Lipogen Forte® combination has proven to be highly effective against BKD (Burnley et al., 2010). When disease is confirmed or suspected, oxytetracycline is usually the drug of choice for treatment of BKD at a dosage of 100 mg OTC/kg fish for 10 to 14 days (Morrison, and Saksida, 2013). ...