Study of the diversity of fish viruses in the water area of the Central Caspian sea by the method of metagenomic sequencing

Abstract

The development of the aquaculture industry, like any industrial cycle, is accompanied by the danger of infectious diseases due to an increase in species per unit area.  The problem is intensified by the fact that aquaculture usually uses water from a body of water adjacent to the production reservoirs. This caused the virus, which has no epidemic potential in the ecosystem due to the sufficiently rare contact of individuals of the same species, to acquire marked pathogenic properties. At the same time, some new viral pathogens cannot be cultured and specific antibodies to them cannot be obtained, which makes it impossible to identify them using traditional methods of cell culture or immunoassay. Metagenomic studies are a relatively new multifaceted tool for studying and identifying single viral infections or co-infections of different aquatic organisms, conducting evolutionary and phylogenetic analysis of viruses, determining their genomic diversity, and conducting epidemiological monitoring of viral infections. The presented article shows brief results of the work on determining the diversity of fish viruses in the Central Caspian water area obtained during metagenomic studies using NGS. The presence of a number of RNA- and DNA-containing viruses of potential danger in the development of aquaculture in the region was shown.

Keywords: Caspian Sea, metagenomics, virome, fish viruses, diversity.