Journal of Aquaculture Research & Development

Abstract

Recent Advances in Researches on Shrimp Immune Pathway Involved in White Spot Syndrome Virus Genes Regulation

Yihong Chen, Xiaoyun Li and Jianguo He

Shrimp is an important aquaculture species. Litopenaeus vannamei, Fenneropenaeus chinensis, Marsupenaeus japonicus, and Penaeus monodon are the main cultivated species in the world. The yield of shrimp culture was about 3,130,000 tons in the year 2013. Though shrimp industry has been made great progress in the last decade, shrimp diseases still endangering the healthy development of this industry. On the one hand, occurring of shrimp disease was the result of kinds of pathogenic microorganism infection, such as WSSV. On the other hand, environmental stress also played an important role in disease outbreak. Researchers have paid more attention to the shrimp immune system, and mechanism of environmental stress responding nowadays. Shrimp immune system, including physical barriers, cellular immunity and humoral immunity, was important for shrimp to combat diseases. Among these, humoral immunity was the most well studied. Currently, the main pathways of the shrimp immune system, including TLRs pathway, IMD pathway, JAK-STAT pathway, RNAi pathway, P38 MAPK pathway, and JNK pathway have been proved to play important roles in shrimp immunity. Meanwhile, shrimp unfolded protein response (UPR) was considered to be the core of its environmental stress resistance system. In addition to ATF6 pathway, the other two branches of UPR, the IRE1-XBP1 pathway and PERK-eIF2α pathway have been shown to exist, and took effect in shrimp environmental stress responding. These studies also revealed a secret of WSSV: it activated and used a number of immune pathways as well as the UPR of shrimp, to increase its genes replication. This review intends to present the latest development in shrimp innate immunity, UPR, and their regulation on WSSV. It will also help us to understand the relationship between shrimp humoral immune response/UPR and WSSV infection.