Glimpses On White Spot Disease in Shrimps and its Significance in e-Resource Development

Abstract

The worldwide distribution of White Spot Disease (WSD) instigated by White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) is one of the most pathogenic and devastating viruses in shrimps and crustaceans. WSSV categorized into a new family named Nimaviridae causes the disease that has been considered as havoc as it severely affects the shrimp population and in its most fatal form due to its high virulence, it has the ability to wipe out all the shrimp population within a week. Surprisingly till date, no effective drugs are available to prevent the disease because of incomplete understanding on the disbandment of the disease mechanism and further protein of this virus has not shown any homology with already existing viral proteins. Earlier, many attempts were made to understand the mechanism of entry, propagation and spread of this virus within the host, but till now, the information and knowledge generated from these studies have not been compiled with an aim to construct systematic and comprehensive e-resource covering information relating to genes, proteins and protein interactions of the disease. To accomplish this, it is imperative to have the understanding about the available resources that contains information and knowledge about this disease so as to provide the complete understanding about the disease and the related phenomena. Such publically available resources can be of extreme importance in developing an e-resource in the form of an online database that might be of much useful to the shrimp and allied researchers and in future of tremendous benefit as the shrimp researchers might perform many operations from the 'omics' data stored in the database. The present paper discusses about WSD, its resources and utility in accomplishing database in a nutshell.