Public Funding for Association of Scottish Shellfish Growers Limited

Aquaculture provides half of all seafood consumed globally and the UK is leading exporter of Atlantic Salmon adding over £1 billion to the British economy every year. Like all animals, aquatic livestock are susceptible to infectious disease. Outbreaks of disease on aquatic farms damage not only farm yields and profitability but jeopardise the welfare of livestock and risk infecting wild-populations too. The industry is keen to adopt new technologies that can more accurately monitor aquatic pathogens and anticipate disease to prevent outbreaks rather than react to them. However, legislation regarding notifiable diseases needs amending in light of modern diagnostic technologies such as metagenomics. The Aquatic Animal Health Regulations (2009) state that a "relevant person" has an "obligation to notify in case of suspicion of a listed disease or increased mortality". Here, a relevant person is defined as an owner or anyone attending to aquatic animals; a person accompanying aquatic animals in transport; any veterinarian or health professional working with aquatic animals or any other person with an occupational relationship to aquatic animals. Notifiable diseases have causative infectious agents: pathogenic microorganisms. Under current legislation it is unclear if detection of notifiable pathogens within environmental samples using diagnostic tools such as metagenomics should cause 'suspicion'. This ambiguity renders aquatic veterinarians and 'relevant persons' hesitant to adopt new diagnostic tools for fear of identifying DNA associated with pathogens and having their operations temporarily halted while the authorities clarify the presence of notifiable disease. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that detection of pathogen DNA within an aquatic environment is enough to suspect disease within aquatic animals nor is there literature to indicate how much DNA from a causative pathogen may be detected within environmental samples when disease is manifest in aquatic animals. Our network of veterinarians, academics and industry leaders will design a research programme that monitors environmental DNA in aquatic environments and correlates the findings with veterinary diagnoses of infectious disease. This research-backed evidence will be used to establish the first standard for notifiable disease monitoring using environmental DNA and metagenomics to provide an evidence-based framework for quantifying suspicion of disease based on environmental metagenomic data. This framework may be used by aquatic veterinarians and 'relevant persons' as well as regulators when implementing new legislation.