Third party funded individual grant
Acronym: PRO-FI
Start date : 01.07.2016
End date : 31.12.2019
Although aquacultures play a very important role for the supply with high-quality food nowadays, tradi-tional fish farms still struggle with commercial viability. One of the relevant reasons for that are fish viruses such as, e.g. koi herpes virus (KHV), viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV) or infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV), that result in very high mortality rates and great losses in case of an outbreak. Unfortunately, there are still no uniform guidelines for disinfection measures after such outbreaks in Germany.
In a recently completed co-operation project at the Institute of Bioprocess Engineering (“Measures against fish viroses in ecologic aquaculture”, FKZ: 2810OE053, BöLN) it was shown for the first time that a common, commercially available protease can be successfully used for inactivation of KHV or VHSV. Nevertheless, the performed experiments still left a lot of unanswered questions. Thus, there is a great need for further research that can lead to establishing a very effective, environmentally friendly and cheap disinfection agent. Therefore, the applicability of various, commercially available, proteases for the disinfection of ponds after the outbreak of economically relevant viral diseases should be investi-gated in the project described here.
Primarily, the inactivation of the above named viruses by various commercially available proteases should be tested in laboratory experiments using cell cultures under environmental conditions. Deter-mined concentrations of the defined proteases will be passed on to the project partners in order to examine the tolerance of the target fish species to chosen proteases and the effectivity of the infection inhibition. Accompanying to the laboratory and field experiments the possibility of the implementation into practical use will be investigated from the legal and economic point of view. Thus, the here described project will be dealing with the examination of a very innovative disinfection agent showing a great potential for its practical use in aquaculture.