Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

Invasive dreissenid mussels pose a significant risk to ecosystems and infrastructure in the western United States and can be very expensive to manage. In 2018, the Bureau of Reclamation issued a Prize Competition for new technologies with the potential to control dreissenids safely and effectively in open waters. The winning solution from Biomilab LLC., was the engineering of an agent that mimics a natural pathogenic mechanism responsible for large die-offs of some marine bivalves known as a disseminated neoplasia (DN). Since the projects initiation in 2019, Biomilab has developed successful mussel aquaculture and cell culture practices and have investigated in-vivo and in-vitro cell division in adult tissue and cells. Biomilab was also able to establish methods for mussel spawning, in vitro fertilization and embryonic cell culture. Plasmid expression vectors were developed and tested, as well as the development of successful microinjection methods. This project continues to gain the support of new partners and support within the scientific community, indicating that this ongoing project has great potential to provide new tools for the control of invasive species and new insight into the molecular and cellular biology of mollusks in general.