Congratulation Eva-Stina Edholm!

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Congratulation Eva-Stina Edholm!

TFS Starting Grant Winner 2017, Eva-Stina Edholm, recently was awarded a grant from the Resarch Counsil of Norway in the category Aquaculture Research (HAVBRUK). The program received 42 proposals and 10 of them were funded.

Eva-Stina Edholm is also one of many talented young participants in UiT and TFS research leader program: Aurora Outstanding.

More about Edholms project:

CRISPRized immortality

Disease continues to be a major challenge for the aquaculture industry resulting in large economical losses and devastatingly negative impacts on fish health. Today the most important prophylactic strategy in the Norwegian aquaculture is vaccination. However, despite recent advances development of next-generation fish vaccines remains challenging. To be able to improve vaccine efficacy a more in depth understanding of how fish protective mechanisms are generated are needed. Essential to achieving this is more sophisticated tools designed specifically for studying salmon immunity. Two key tools are i) salmon cell lines, used as understudies to live fish in a broad range of immunological studies and, ii) salmon specific monoclonal antibodies, used to identify and measure specific immune cells. To date, both salmon cell lines and salmon specific antibodies are in short supply.

Recent biotechnological innovations, including CRISPR/Cas gene editing has revolutionized genome editing and made it easier to apply genetic engineering to non-model organisms, including salmonids. In this project we will take advantage of the CRISPR technology to disturb the normal cell cycle program with the goal of generating immortalized cells that will form the basis of different salmon cell lines. CRISPR technology will also be implemented to “tag” key immune gene with small easily traceable markers. This will provide an alternative to the conventional and often time cumbersome approach to generate anti-salmon specific antibodies and provide a way to effectively study the function of immune genes at the protein level. The availability of these tools stand to have a high impact on many aspects of fish health by facilitating studies into how the salmon immune response controls infections.