People Development Program: Aquatic animal health training scheme - Marianne Douglas
The Molecular Biology group at the Animal Health Laboratory of the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water & Environment, provides diagnostic and disease investigation services for aquaculture industries in Tasmania. The increasing reliance on molecular techniques for the detection and identification of disease agents in aquatic animal health is undeniable. Due to the ever increasing number and more efficient molecular techniques becoming available and the dynamic nature of newly emerging pathogens, specialist training is increasingly important for the delivery of effective and useful services to aquaculture. Presently, species identification relies heavily on biochemical tests and cellular fatty acid analysis, or 16S rDNA gene sequencing, all of which at times can be non-definitive. Multi-locus sequence analysis uses several housekeeping genes to assign a species designations, and is a technique that is easy to use, accurate, and has great discriminatory power (McTaggart et al., 2010). The multi locus sequencing skills acquired would enable us to more specifically and accurately perform species identification and determine genetic diversity among different isolates and build up a gene bank of sequences in the future.