Services

About CSIC: The infrastructure offered by CSIC are located in the campus of the Instituto de Acuicultura de Torre de la Sal (IATS) in Castellón and in Ribera de Cabanes, Castellón (IEO-ICAR-MAP), Spain. The users will be able to develop a research project using highly qualified facilities and having access to a research environment which has proven to be highly productive in the previous AQUAEXCEL and AQUAEXCEL2020 projects.

Users will have the opportunity to consult, have advice and interchange ideas with experts on most of the disciplines in Aquaculture, with notable excellence in marine fish parasites, fish pathology, fish immunology, nutrigenomics, genomics, biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology to study and control fish reproduction, food intake and growth, Artemia, and fish larviculture.

IATS-EXP comprises about 250 research holding tanks with different shapes and capacities (from 3000 l to 30 l) located in different units at IATS, with a total surface of 2100 m2, and the associated wet labs and sampling rooms. The open sea flow provides 90,000 m3/h and water temperature ranges naturally from 11 to 28 ˚C. Tanks with recirculation and heat/cooling systems are available in some units. Water quality (salinity, temperature, filtration, etc.) and light conditions (photoperiod, intensity, etc.) vary depending on the type of projects and specific tanks in use.

IATS-EXP installations are adequate for conducting experiments in most of the disciplines involved in aquaculture research: Health and welfare (parasite and bacterial challenges), physiology and energy metabolism (hypoxia priming and pre-conditioning, swimming exercise tests), reproduction, nutrition and growth, live prey and larval rearing. Biosensor technology, based on the use of the AEFishBIT datalogger developed in AQUAEXCEL2020, is also available for individual and poorly invasive monitoring of respiratory frequency and jerk acceleration in juvenile and adult fish. Experimental studies can be conducted with a great variety of species: gilthead sea bream, European sea bass, sole, turbot, mussel, clam and Artemia, with access to one of the largest Artemia cysts collection available in Europe.

Support offered

Users will receive access to all necessary equipment, live animals and consumables to complete their research project, as agreed in their access proposal. Use of tanks will include maintenance, water supply, daily feeding, husbandry, manipulation and sampling of fish.

Users will be provided with any necessary technical assistance, training and advice on methodologies, experimental design and data analysis. In addition, users will be trained by highly qualified and experienced technical and scientific personnel on methodologies, experimental design and data analysis.

The access will include assessment by technical and scientific personnel and will depend on the type of project. Remote assistance for in silico and meta-analysis is also envisaged. Users will have the opportunity to consult, have advice and interchange ideas with scientific staff with expertise on most of the disciplines in Aquaculture, with notable excellence in marine fish nutrition and pathology, larviculture and nutritional enrichment of live preys, Artemia biology, fish immunology and biochemistry, and cellular and molecular biology to study and control fish reproduction, food intake and growth from early life stages to completion of production cycles. Thus, users will have the opportunity of learning how to run a project under the best experimental conditions and to apply this knowledge to their own infrastructures back to their countries.

Access to equipment and consumables will be as agreed in the access proposal. Access to transcriptomic and genomic databases will also be provided when agreed. During the stage at infrastructures, users will have access to the full text journals and databases. This will imply a quick and efficient way of acquiring bibliographic information, and more opportunities to discuss the information available and to produce high quality scientific publications.

Users will be integrated in a research group and expected to collaborate in all the research process including report and article writing and publishing. The visiting scientist will receive support for finding accommodation.

Modality of access

The Modality of access is unit.cost and the unit of access are defined as person/weeks - the number of weeks each person in a project is using a set of analytical laboratories for the analyses of samples (IATSANA) or a set of experimental tanks and associated lab units (IATS-EXP and IEO-ICAR-MAP).

For IATS-ANA a typical access consists of 4 units of access, for IATS-EXP it will be 12 units of access, and for IEO-ICARMAP it will consist of 8 units.

CSIC infrastructures will carry out experiments and provide physical access to its facilities during crucial periods of the running experiments. The typical stay for IATS-ANA users are 4 weeks, and for IATS-EXP and IEO-ICAR-MAP each user or user group is expected to stay 2 weeks at the infrastructure distributed at the convenience of the user (typically at the beginning of the experiment to f inalize the technical protocol details and start the experiment and at the end of the experiment for final measurements and sampling).