09.07.2024
Interview: Lionel GOARDON, Zootechnical Engineer, Head of the trout experimental farm PEIMA at INRAE, France
Interviewer: Lucie Gavin-Plagne, PhD | Field Application Scientist at IMV Technologies
The interview delves into the challenges and solutions involved in fish sperm cryobanking. Cryobanking is crucial for maintaining genetic diversity and securing genetic resources.
Everyday fish farmers need to cope with the risk of loosing their genetic due to technical issues, water quality issues, sanitary outbreaks and even malicious acts.
To overcome these risks, Lionel has implemented 3 main measures:
1. Fish farming measures: Health prophylaxis, breeding multiple generations per line, duplicating breeding tanks, and establishing mirror sites for breeding duplicates.
2. Breeding mirror sites: While providing maximum livestock security, these sites come with high costs, space requirements, and logistical challenges, making them less feasible for all lines.
3. Cryobanking: Storing fish sperm in a cryobank ensures long-term security and saves space, particularly for certain genetic lines. However, it's limited to male sperm and faces variability in fertility rates between males.
Lessons learned from past experiences include the indispensability of mirror sites and the need to optimize cryobanking efficiency. Technical adaptations for avoiding variability in results and rigorous quality control have been introduced to enhance cryobanking processes.
Quality control measures involve assessing fertilization rates of frozen semen batches relative to fresh semen batches. Variability management is crucial, as cryopreservation can amplify difficulties with fertilization.
Lionel Goardon emphasizes the importance of identifying and refining each step of the process to ensure optimal fertility. Factors influencing semen quality include breeding practices, human expertise, technical equipment, and water quality.
An example illustrates how feed management impacts male fertility, highlighting the need to maintain energy reserves in males to ensure gamete quality. Decisions like continuing to feed males before ovulation peaks and harvesting them for freezing at the right time are made to improve results.
Question: What were you able to identify as important points for managing variability?
Lionel: Cryopreservation exacerbates difficulties with fertilization, things you can't see when everything's going well. Every little mistake is amplified by cryopreservation (male and female gamete quality). If eggs are of average quality, cryopreservation will amplify this average quality.
What's your top tip?
1. Identify each process step
2. Check if the protocols are approximate, and if so, make them more strict to ensure good fertility at the end. Every little variation in the protocol will alter performance, and this will be amplified with frozen semen. You need to be good at everything!
According to you and your experience, which factor has the greatest impact on semen quality?
They're all important ! I see 4 main factors:
Breeding factor: Feeding (broodstock feed, environmental quality, sanitation, breeding environment (stress, photoperiod, broodstock handling),
Human factor: Having a dedicated, trained and experienced technician.
Technical factor : using the appropriate equipments. Before we were using liquid nitrogen vapours to freeze. For a better standardization and less variability, we have now a Digitcool, an automated controlled-rate freezer.
Water quality : biochemical properties, density, temperature
The interview underscores the complexity of fish sperm cryobanking and the multifaceted approach required to maintain genetic diversity and ensure the quality of stored sperm. Despite challenges, ongoing efforts in quality control and process optimization are essential for the success of cryobanking initiatives in aquaculture research and conservation.
In order to tackle these challenges, IMV Technologies is proposing a complete range of standardized products and service offer to help you in implementing a cryolab. This offer includes an audit, especially a pre-sale audit to ensure that everything is ready for beginning a cryolab process. This audit is made by a technical expert, Lionel Goardon, who has more than 30 years of experience in a trout farm.
A complete handbook for each step from sperm collection to oocyte fertilization is part of the offer when you are using a cryolab.
Our Field Application team is dedicated to support our customers worldwide for any biological and process considerations. In aquaculture, we provide a personalized 1 to 3 years training and support to help you to manage the cryolab, ensure that the process is standardized and used in an optimal way, and give you all the clues to be autonomous in your daily work when freezing salmonid sperm!
Do you want to discuss our Cryolab Technical Offer? Fill in the form to contact our Technical Department : https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0b5Zw_0
Any additional questions? Contact us via email: contact-imv@imv-technologies.com
