Acute environmental hypoxia induced changes of tissue morphology, antioxidant capacity, immune response and energy metabolism in Marsupenaeus japonicus

Abstract

The current study was to investigate the influence of acute hypoxia on the tissue morphology, antioxidant capacity, immune response and energy metabolism in Marsupenaeus japonicus. A total of 180 shrimp were cultured and sampled at 0 h, 2 h, 4 h, 6 h, 10 h after hypoxia. Our findings revealed that acute hypoxia occurred, which was confirmed by darken serum color, increased hepatopancreas hemocyanin and hypoxia-inducible factor 1 expression. Inter-tissue differences existed in gene expression relating to the antioxidant capacity, immune response, and energy metabolism. Expression levels of the above index showed inconsistent trends in the hepatopancreas, while muscle gene expression showed an overall trend of first increasing and then decreasing. Muscle gene expression of energy metabolism (except for glycogen phosphorylase gene) reached the highest value (7.33–227.92 times) after hypoxic for 2 h, and the response was earlier and larger than that of hepatopancreas. Taken together, our results demonstrated that hypoxia could change serum color, influence antioxidant capacity, immune response and energy metabolism n M.japonicus. The response mechanism was tissue-specific and muscle might be the target response tissue for energy metabolism in M.japonicus.