Ben Reading
Associate Professor
David Clark Labs 236
Bio
Education
Ph.D., North Carolina State University (2008)
Research Interests
Reproductive Physiology and Aquaculture of Fishes
Egg Quality
We aim to understand the fundamentals of oogenesis and egg quality in fishes. Poor egg quality is a major problem in finfish aquaculture that has remained intractable and causally unknown despite decades of research. We apply recent advances in functional genomics to address widespread female reproductive failure in fisheries and on commercial fish farms and to provide solutions to this problem.
Egg Yolk Formation
Developing offspring of oviparous animals are entirely dependent on stored egg yolk for nutritional sustenance. The nutrients stored in the ovulated egg must be sufficient to sustain the development of progeny from the time of fertilization to the onset of exogenous feeding. Vitellogenesis is the process whereby the required yolk nutrients are deposited into growing oocytes, which eventually give rise to eggs. These nutrients consist of maternally derived substances, including proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, and minerals that are collectively transported from the liver to the ovary in the form of circulating yolk precursors called vitellogenins. We characterize this complex and fundamental process to better understand oogenesis and egg quality in commercially important fish species.
Genomic Enablement
The goal of the National Program for Genetic Improvement and Selective Breeding for the Hybrid Striped Bass Industry is domestication and selective breeding to produce superior hybrid striped bass that will enable commercial producers not only to continue bringing fish to market, but also to decrease product prices and expand the industry. We are currently sequencing the striped bass and white bass genomes to further this effort.
Web Resources
Publications
- Antiparasitic effects of peracetic acid on Striped Bass infested with Trichodina spp. , NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF AQUACULTURE (2024)
- Combinatorial metabolomic and transcriptomic analysis of muscle growth in hybrid striped bass (female white bass Morone chrysops x male striped bass M. saxatilis) , BMC GENOMICS (2024)
- A supervised machine learning workflow for the reduction of highly dimensional biological data , ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE LIFE SCIENCES (2023)
- Differential bumble bee gene expression associated with pathogen infection and pollen diet , BMC Genomics (2023)
- Discovery Proteomics and Absolute Protein Quantification Can Be Performed Simultaneously on an Orbitrap-Based Mass Spectrometer , ACS OMEGA (2023)
- Machine learning and data mining methodology to predict nominal and numeric performance body weight values using Large White male turkey datasets , JOURNAL OF APPLIED POULTRY RESEARCH (2023)
- Machine learning reveals common transcriptomic signatures across rat brain and placenta following developmental organophosphate ester exposure , TOXICOLOGICAL SCIENCES (2023)
- Where Does Our Seafood Come From? , (2022)
- Differential Bumble Bee Gene Expression Associated With Pathogen Infection And Pollen Diet , (2021)
- The effect of piscidin antimicrobial peptides on the formation of Gram-negative bacterial biofilms , JOURNAL OF FISH DISEASES (2021)