CEFAS24-39 ITT for services for holistic approaches to investigating disease in aquatic animal systems in India, under the Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP)

The Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP) is funded through official development assistance (ODA) as part of the UK's £500 million Blue Planet Fund. Through the OCPP, the UK government partners with ODA-eligible countries to deliver tangible and positive impacts on the livelihoods of coastal communities that depend on healthy marine ecosystems. The programme supports countries to strengthen marine science expertise, develop science-based policy and management tools, and create educational resources for coastal communities.

Under the sustainable seafood objective, the programme supports the development of the skills and expertise needed to adopt sustainable seafood practices. This will reduce risks such as the spread of zoonotic diseases from unsustainable or unsafe activities, and will support trade in safe seafood. The programme will also help crack down on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by supporting the development of better management, monitoring and enforcement capabilities.

Following a One Health Aquaculture workshop, held in Kerala, India in February 2023, key priorities were identified for India that support the overall aim of the Sustainable Seafood project. These priorities are:

• Aquatic disease
• Water quality
• Climate change
• AMR

In this project we aim to combine the four key priorities in one project focusing on investigating emerging and/or cryptic aquatic animal disease. Given the scope of this funding, only disease in marine or brackishwater aquatic animal culture can be investigated.

This project aims to investigate an aquatic animal culture system in India that is experiencing clinical signs of disease and/or mortalities using a holistic approach (sampling both the affected species and the environment that it is cultured in). Traditional methods to investigate disease, such as histopathology and basic water quality measurements, will be combined with metatranscriptomics, and microbial/algal community analysis (including 16S bacterial and 18S eukaryote metagenomics) and chemical analysis to provide information on the parameters involved in disease and health states of the aquatic animal of interest.

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