Establishment of a genetically amenable fibroblast cell line from Atlantic salmon skin.

The Atlantic salmon, Salmo Salar, is a societally important species of fish, both as a food source and as a component of aquatic biosphere. Its sustainable production is hampered by a wide range of infectious diseases, which is difficult to address due to the lack of in vitro tools to study the disease-host interaction. In this paper, we describe the establishment and characterization of a homogenous Atlantic salmon skin fibroblast (ASSF) cell line. This immortalized cell line grows well in standard media formulations and is capable of migration. It is transcriptionally stable over dozens of passages, and its transcriptome is distinct from other publicly available Atlantic salmon cell lines (SHK1 and ASK). Even though ASSF cells show limited cytopathic effects when challenged with Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis Virus (IPNV) molecular evidence reveals that they are infected and support IPNV production, especially compared to other cell lines like ASK or SHK1. The potential of the ASSF cell line as a tool for Atlantic salmon research is highlighted by its permissibility to genetic manipulation with various methods including CRISPR/cas9, transfection and transduction.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Jacob, through AquaGen AS provided support for genotyping and analysis of genotype data. However no conflict of interest is present. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)