Developing novel non-invasive methods to detect disease

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Infectious diseases are a major concern for this vital food-producing industry, costing $3 billion annually, and threatening the economic sustainability of production (FAO 2012). Diagnosis is especially difficult in aquaculture and infections are often not detected before serious symptoms and death occurs. In addition, current standard diagnostic tools (ELISAs, PCR) only test for the presence of previously described pathogens, are most often invasive, and are limited in that they can only detect infection in each individual tested, and not the population as a whole.

Addressing this problem Dr Daniel Bray from NRI and I set out to develop a non-invasive method to detect stress and disease in the surrounding water.

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Additionaly, I am working together with Daniel Bray and Fredrik Jutfelt to elucidate the chemicals involved in predator avoidance in zebrafish.