The cellular fatty acid profile is profoundly altered in WSSV-infected shrimp

Abstract

The disease most impacting the global shrimp aquaculture industry is white spot disease or WSD The WSD causative agent white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is a virus The virus is a novel large dsDNA virus and pathogenesis is still quite poorly understood Recently we found that WSSV induces a metabolic rerouting known as the invertebrate Warburg effect which boosts the availability of energy and biosynthetic building blocks in the WSSV genome replication stage (12 hpi) Here we show that unlike the lipogenesis that is seen in cancer cells that are undergoing the Warburg effect at 12 hpi all of the long chain fatty acids (LCFAs) were significantly decreased This means that a non-selective lipolysis was induced by WSSV the LCFAs were apparently diverted into β-oxidation and used to supplement the TCA cycle Conversely at 24 hpi when the Warburg effect had ceased the significant increase of most of the LCFAs implied that fatty acid synthesis was triggered at the late stage We also found that at 24 hpi but not at 12 hpi the PI3K-Akt-mTOR-HIF1? pathway induced the expression of fatty acid synthase (FAS) WSSV virion formation was impaired in the presence of the FAS inhibitor C75 although viral gene and viral genome levels were unaffected In order to complete its replication cycle WSSV therefore appears to use the same PI3K-Akt-mTOR signaling pathway to trigger both the Warburg effect at 12 hpi and lipogenesis at 24 hpi

Date of Award	2014 Sept 5
Original language	English
Supervisor	Han-Ching Wang (Supervisor)