Growth, immunity and transcriptome response to different stocking densities in Litopenaeus vannamei

Hang Yuan; Minghua Xie; Naijie Hu; Yudong Zheng; Cuihong Hou; Beiping Tan; Lili Shi; Shuang Zhang

doi:10.1016/j.fsi.2023.108924

Growth, immunity and transcriptome response to different stocking densities in Litopenaeus vannamei

Fish Shellfish Immunol. 2023 Aug:139:108924. doi: 10.1016/j.fsi.2023.108924. Epub 2023 Jul 4.

Authors

Hang Yuan¹, Minghua Xie², Naijie Hu¹, Yudong Zheng¹, Cuihong Hou¹, Beiping Tan³, Lili Shi¹, Shuang Zhang⁴

Affiliations

¹ College of Fisheries, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, China.
² College of Fisheries and Life Science, Dalian Ocean University, Dalian, China; State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Hubei Hongshan Laboratory, The Innovation Academy of Seed Design, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.
³ College of Fisheries, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, China; Key Laboratory of Aquatic, Livestock and Poultry Feed Science and Technology in South China, Ministry of Agriculture, Zhanjiang, China; GuangDong Engineering Technology Research Center of Aquatic Animals Precision Nutrition and High Efficiency Feed, Zhanjiang, China; Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Aquatic Animal Disease Control and Healthy Culture, Zhanjiang, 524088, China.
⁴ College of Fisheries, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, China; Key Laboratory of Aquatic, Livestock and Poultry Feed Science and Technology in South China, Ministry of Agriculture, Zhanjiang, China; GuangDong Engineering Technology Research Center of Aquatic Animals Precision Nutrition and High Efficiency Feed, Zhanjiang, China; Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Aquatic Animal Disease Control and Healthy Culture, Zhanjiang, 524088, China. Electronic address: zshuang@gdou.edu.cn.

PMID: 37406891
DOI: 10.1016/j.fsi.2023.108924

Abstract

The effects of different stocking densities on Litopenaeus vannamei were investigated from the aspects of growth performance, immune response and transcriptome in this experiment. L. vannamei (initial body weight: 0.30 ± 0.02 g) were reared for 8 weeks at three stocking densities of 100 (LSD), 200 (MSD) and 300 (HSD) shrimp/m³, respectively. The results showed that the survival rate (SR), final body weight (FBW), weight gain rate (WGR), specific growth ratio (SGR) and protein efficiency ratio (PER) of L. vannamei significantly decreased, while the feed factor (FCR) significantly increased with the increase of stocking density. After Vibrio parahemolyticus infection, the SR of L. vannamei in the HSD group was significantly lower than that in the LSD and MSD groups. Increasing stocking density significantly increased the activities of aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and lysozyme (LYS) while significantly decreased the activities of catalase (CAT) and phenol oxidase (PO) in the serum of L. vannamei. Similar changes of the gene expression as the activities of immune enzymes were found in the hemocytes. Pairwise comparison between the LSD, MSD and HSD group in the transcriptome analysis identified that there were 304, 1376 and 2083 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in LSD vs MSD, MSD vs HSD and LSD vs HSD, respectively. Among them, most of the immune-related DEGs were down-regulated and metabolism-related DEGs were up-regulated with the increasing stocking density. In addition, KEGG enrichment pathway analysis revealed that several immune and metabolic related pathways including PI3K-Akt signaling pathway and AMPK signaling pathway were significantly enriched. Of these, the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway had the most DEGs and was also the most significantly enriched pathway. Furthermore, 16 DEGs (such as FOXO, PCK2 and CTSC, etc.) and partial immune enzyme activity (such as AST, CAT and PO, etc.) changes were closely correlated with the increase of stocking density when partial immune-related DEGs and immune-related enzymes were analyzed jointly. All these results indicated that changes in stocking density had a significant effect on the growth performance, immunity and transcriptome of L. vannamei.

Keywords: Immunity; Litopenaeus vannamei; Stocking density; Transcriptome analysis.

MeSH terms

Animals
Body Weight
Immunity, Innate / genetics
Penaeidae*
Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinases / genetics
Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-akt / genetics
Transcriptome*

Substances

Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinases
Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-akt