The genetic basis of infectivity remains largely unexplored as it is extremely difficult to disentangle infection disease resistance, tolerance, and infectivity. This is especially important to move from the concept of individual disease resistance to that of herd/sea-cage resistance (Doeschl-Wilson et al. 2021), particularly in the case of bacterial diseases, to reduce the use of antibiotics. To understand the genomic mechanisms underlying transmissibility requires the ability to measure the amount of pathogen that individual fish shed during infection. To this end, it should be essential to produce genetically barcoded “pseudo-strains” from the same wild-type virulent strain. The aim is to create genetically modified pseudostrains from Vibrio anguillarum, a bacterial pathogen that affects several important fish species of aquaculture relevance. Barcoded strains will then be used to infect in an experimental challenge several families of European sea bass, which will be subsequently genotyped to assess the role of genetics in pathogen transmission.

Five publications related to the Reasearch topic for the candidate interview:

• Doeschl-Wilson A, Knap PW, Opriessnig T, More SJ. Review: Livestock disease resilience: from individual to herd level. Animal. 2021 Dec;15 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):100286.
• Alker AT, Farrell MV, Aspiras AE, Dunbar TL, Fedoriouk A, Jones JE, Mikhail SR, Salcedo GY, Moore BS, Shikuma NJ. A modular plasmid toolkit applied in marine bacteria reveals functional insights during bacteria-stimulated metamorphosis. mBio. 2023 Aug 31;14(4):e0150223.
• Herbert, Adam M. Deutschbauer, BarTn7: Optimizing Bacterial Lineage Tracking at Sub-Species Resolution for Population Dynamics in Ecological and Evolutionary Studies doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.24.690285
• Stukenberg D, Hoff J, Faber A, Becker A. Protocol for NT-CRISPR: A Method for Efficient Genome Engineering in Vibrio natriegens. Methods Mol Biol. 2025;2850:365-375.
• Corts A, Thomason LC, Costantino N, Court DL. Recombineering in Non-Model Bacteria. Curr Protoc. 2022 Dec;2(12):e605.

Tutor: Prof. Tomaso Patarnello
e-mail address: tomaso.patarnello@unipd.it