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About the Authors:
Sixin Liu
Affiliation: USDA/ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, Kearneysville, West Virginia, United States of America
Guangtu Gao
Affiliation: USDA/ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, Kearneysville, West Virginia, United States of America
Yniv Palti
Affiliation: USDA/ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, Kearneysville, West Virginia, United States of America
Beth M. Cleveland
Affiliation: USDA/ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, Kearneysville, West Virginia, United States of America
Gregory M. Weber
Affiliation: USDA/ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, Kearneysville, West Virginia, United States of America
Caird E. Rexroad III
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: USDA/ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, Kearneysville, West Virginia, United States of America
Introduction
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing animal food producing sector of agriculture. Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is not only an important aquaculture species; it is also a primary research model for fish [1]. Fish under intensive rearing conditions experience various stressful conditions such as handling, crowding, sub-optimal water quality and temperature fluctuations. Stress has been shown to have negative impacts on survival, growth, reproduction and fillet quality [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], therefore to improve production efficiency it is crucial to understand stress responses at the physiological and molecular levels. To this end stress responses have been extensively studied in fishes [4], [10], [11], [12].
The stress response is initiated by the activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-interrenal (HPI) axis and release of catecholamines from chromaffin cells that induce many biochemical and physiological changes [4]. The advent of microarray technologies made it possible to observe global changes in gene expression in response to stress and these stress hormones [12], [13], [14]. For instance, a custom microarray was used to study gene expression changes after handling [15], and the 16K microarray for salmonid species was used to study the transcriptome response to heat stress in the red blood cells of rainbow trout [16]. Although the use of microarrays was a significant advance in exploring the transcriptome response to stress in rainbow trout [12], they have several limitations. For example, detection is limited to the probes included in the microarray design, the detection range is limited by background signal and signal saturation, and...