Descripción del proyecto
Obtención de imágenes en tiempo real del desarrollo de los peces
El desarrollo anormal de los peces planos durante la metamorfosis entorpece su acuicultura eficaz. Aunque la transición de larva a pez se ha estudiado ampliamente, los métodos se han basado sobre todo en secciones históricas y la elaboración de perfiles de expresión génica. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos OPTIMAR pretende investigar las rutas de señalización molecular específicas asociadas con metamorfosis anormales. Los investigadores desarrollarán herramientas de obtención de imágenes ópticas y no invasivas que puedan visualizar directamente los mecanismos de metamorfosis a lo largo de la vida de los peces planos. En combinación con métodos de reconstrucción de imágenes, permitirá generar imágenes de alta calidad, así como identificar marcadores de desarrollo normal y anormal. Los resultados ayudarán a mantener la acuicultura de los peces planos y la hará más rentable.
Objetivo
Aquaculture is a sustainable means of generating high-quality fish to satisfy the growing global fish consumption. Flatfish are attractive species for aquaculture due to their high market value and consumer demand. However, abnormal development during metamorphosis is often a problem and has hampered the development of successful flatfish aquaculture. Hence, it is critical to understand the specific molecular signalling pathways associated with abnormal metamorphosis.
Larval metamorphosis has been studied using histological sections and gene expression profiling. However, the first requires sacrificing fish and the latter uses pool of larvae. Hence, there is an increasing demand for 3D imaging tools to directly visualise the mechanisms of metamorphosis in whole live flatfish. This offers a unique opportunity for optical imaging (OI) modalities, which are becoming popular for imaging targeted biological processes in model organisms (e.g. zebrafish). However, their full potential for biology and non-model organisms is being overlooked.
The vision for this fellowship is to develop a non-invasive OI tool for real-time 3D in vivo imaging, for studying the molecular mechanisms regulating flatfish metamorphosis. The project combines recent advances in the mathematics of forward and inverse problems, marine molecular biology and modern OI technologies, including selective plane illumination microscopy and optical projection tomography. The developed OI tools will provide clear high-resolution pictures from the inside of live flatfish. Accurate light propagation models and image reconstruction methods will be developed to obtain high-quality images of biological significance. Moreover, novel acquisition schemes will be implemented to enable real-time 3D imaging. Finally, the OI tools will be used for in vivo flatfish imaging to obtain markers of normal and abnormal metamorphosis. This is essential to establish a sustainable and profitable flatfish aquaculture industry.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Convocatoria de propuestas
Consulte otros proyectos de esta convocatoriaConvocatoria de subcontratación
H2020-WF-01-2018
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinador
8005-139 FARO
Portugal