Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

Biomilab LLC has been working for three years on a project aimed at developing, validating, and manufacturing an invasive mussel eradication agent that mimics a natural pathogenic mechanism found in marine bivalves called a disseminated neoplasia (DN). A DN is a form of cancer where the cancer cells themselves travel between organisms in a specific-species manner causing toxicity in the host. Biomilab has established invasive mussel aquaculture in their laboratory and determined methods for the prolonged survival of dissociated mussel cells in culture. They have utilized sequence data provided by Reclamation, and plasmid DNA vectors were constructed for transgene expression and tested in insect cell lines as a proxy for mussel cells. Biomilab tested more than a dozen methods of transduction on mussel cells and determined that because mitotic cells are quite rare, transduced foreign DNA cannot enter the nucleus and is not expressed. In the third year, the focus was on overcoming issues of transduction by exploring infection with recombinant viruses and by establishing methods for the controlled spawning and generation of quagga and zebra mussel embryos by in vitro fertilization.