Search

Nervous Necrosis Virus (NNV) is one of the major viral pathogens in aquaculture, affecting a wide range of fish species and causing high mortality rates. The gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata) has long been considered resistant to NNV, until recently, when significant mortalities caused by a reassortant NNV strain were reported in sea bream hatcheries (Volpe et al. 2020). Since the larval stage is the most susceptible life-stage to NNV, vaccination is not a feasible option due to the immaturity of the immune system. Selective breeding to enhance resistance against the reassortant NNV strain might be a possibility as a disease preventive action. Here, we analysed for the first time the genetic basis of viral nervous necrosis (VNN) mortality in gilthead sea bream larvae and we assessed the accuracy in the genomic prediction of this trait.

Background. The blue shark (Prionace glauca, Linnaeus 1758) is one of the most abundant epipelagic shark inhabiting all the oceans except the poles, including the Mediterranean Sea, but its genetic structure has not been confirmed at basin and interoceanic distances. Past tagging programs in the Atlantic Ocean failed to find evidence of migration of blue sharks between the Mediterranean and the adjacent Atlantic, despite the extreme vagility of the species. Although the high rate of by-catch in the Mediterranean basin, to date no genetic study on Mediterranean blue shark was carried out, which constitutes a significant knowledge gap, considering that this population is classified as "Critically Endangered", unlike its open-ocean counterpart. Methods. Blue shark phylogeography and demography in the Mediterranean Sea and North-Eastern Atlantic Ocean were inferred using two mitochondrial genes (Cytb and control region) amplified from 207 and 170 individuals respectively, collected from six localities across the Mediterranean and two from the North-Eastern Atlantic. Results. Although no obvious pattern of geographical differentiation was apparent from the haplotype network,Phi;st analyses indicated significant genetic structure among four geographical groups. Demographic analyses suggest that these populations have experienced a constant population expansion in the last 0.4-0.1 million of years. Discussion. The weak, but significant, differences in Mediterranean and adjacent North-eastern Atlantic blue sharks revealed a complex phylogeographic structure, which appears to reject the assumption of panmixia across the study area, but also supports a certain degree of population connectivity across the Strait of Gibraltar, despite the lack of evidence of migratory movements observed by tagging data. Analyses of spatial genetic structure in relation to sex-ratio and size could indicate some level of sex/stage biased migratory behaviour. © 2017 Leone et al.

New shape memory alloys have been developed in the last few years with high martensitic transformation temperatures. However, the highest martensitic transformation temperatures are lower than 200°C and they are achieved with very complex alloys. New Cu-Al-Ag shape memory alloys have been developed with martensitic transformation temperatures ranging from 250 to 400°C. It is really interesting to increase the knowledge of the phase stability behaviour when cycling the alloy above or below the martensitic transformation temperature because of the high temperatures involved. Two Cu-Al-Ag shape memory alloys with very different composition have been thermal cycled in a DSC following the amount of energy release during the forward and reverse transformation and the changes of the martensitic transformation temperatures in order to follow the phase changes that takes place during cycling. En los últimos años, se han desarrollado nuevas aleaciones con memoria de forma, de altas temperaturas de transformación martensítica. Sin embargo, las temperaturas de transformación martensítica más elevadas son inferiores a 200°C e implican aleaciones de gran complejidad. Nuevas aleaciones con memoria de forma Cu-Al-Ag han sido desarrolladas con temperaturas de transformación entre 250 y 400°C. Es de gran importancia incrementar el conocimiento de la estabilidad de las fases durante el ciclado por encima o por debajo de la temperatura de transformación martensítica a causa de las altas temperaturas involucradas. Dos aleaciones con memoria de forma Cu-Al-Ag con muy diferente composición química han sido cicladas en el DSC midiendo la cantidad de energía liberada durante las transformaciones directa e inversa, así como los cambios en las temperaturas de transformación, con objeto de caracterizar las transformaciones de fase que tienen lugar durante el ciclado.