Bacteriología asociada al cultivo de moluscos en Chile. Avances y perspectivas

Abstract

Excessive fishing effort has led to overexploitation and depletion of major benthic fisheries in Chile, so it has been encouraged cultivation of major overexploited benthic resources in controlled environments, mainly those which are not possible to collect seeds from environment. In this review, the current knowledge on bacteriology associated with shellfish farming in controlled systems in Chile, including both aspects associated with development of infectious diseases of bacterial aetiology as well as the use of microorganisms to reduce mortality of cultured species, is described. The majority of bacteriological studies in Chilean shellfish culture were done in the Chilean scallop, Argopecten purpuratus and were related to identifying pathogens isolated from mass mortalities occurred in larval and/or juvenile cultures and the verification of their pathogenic activity performing bioassays under controlled condition bioassays. There are also a large number of studies on bacteria exhibiting inhibitory activities against shellfish pathogenic and their protective effects under controlled conditions. Despite the above, still are required more studies to know the structure and dynamics of the microbiota associated to mollusk culture, bacterial pathogens and molecular elements encoding for their pathogenicity.