Fish & Shellsh Immunology 34 (2013) 953

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Fish & Shellsh Immunology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fsi

Editorial

Innate immune system of shrimp

This special issue of Fish & Shellsh Immunology is aimed to review a current research on shrimp immunity. The knowledge on the innate immune responses of shrimp to invading microorganisms provides insights to the mechanisms of hostpathogen interactions which will bring about the search of the effective method for controlling and preventing infectious diseases in aquaculture. Despite the lack of whole genome information, several putative immune genes have been discovered in Penaeid shrimps but the function of those genes and their coding proteins remains largely unknown. Several putative genes found in the shrimps show high similarity to those reported in other arthropods implying that similar immune pathways are likely exist such as the Toll and/or IMD pathway. Nevertheless, without the functional characterization of molecules in the pathways, the importance of these immune responses could not be claried. Therefore, this special issue is intended to updating the role of those genes and their encoding proteins that are being demonstrated and would lead to a better knowledge of immune responses in shrimp. In this special issue, eight review articles focus on the function of major immune molecules/pathways in the innate immune responses of shrimp. The rst article provides the overview on the discovery of immune molecules by genomics and proteomics approaches and recent data on functional analysis of those immune molecules. The other articles focus on the major immune responses of shrimp such as melanization, clotting system, apoptosis and

signaling pathways. The current knowledge on the pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) of shrimp is also reviewed here to provide understanding of the pathogen recognition mechanisms. Shrimp molecular responses to viral pathogens are also reviewed in this special issue. One article emphasizes on the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway which is an important antiviral mechanism in shrimp while the other provides information on several viral binding proteins in shrimp that consequently induce innate antiviral responses. Finally, I would like to give my special thanks to Prof. Ikuo Hirono for inviting me to be a guest editor of this special issue of Fish & Shellsh Immunology. I also thank all authors of the eight articles in this special issue for their outstanding work and longterm contribution to the knowledge of shrimp immunity.

Anchalee Tassanakajon* Center of Excellence for Molecular Biology and Genomics of Shrimp, Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand * Tel.: 66 2 218 5439; fax: 66 2 218 5418. E-mail address: anchalee.k@chula.ac.th Available online 6 October 2012

1050-4648/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fsi.2012.09.024