The green sturgeon, Acipenser medirostris, is one of two acipenserid fishes native to the temperate waters of the Pacific coast of North America. Originally, three species of sturgeon were described from this region, and this one named ‘‘medirostris’’ or ‘‘middle snout’’ based on the length of its rostrum relative to the other purported species (Ayers 1854), both of which were later determined ...

Here we present the first isolation of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I genes from two ancient fish, paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) and Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis). Seventeen sequences obtained showed high polymorphism and positive natural selection with dN/dS>1. Evolutionary relationships revealed that sequences from paddlefish and Chinese sturgeon distinguished from ot...

A multistressor study was conducted to investigate interactive effects of nutritional status and salinity on osmoregulation of juvenile white sturgeon. Our hypothesis was that lower nutritional status would decrease the salinity tolerance of juvenile white sturgeon. A four-week feed restriction (12.5%, 25%, 50%, 100% of optimum feeding rate: OFR defined as the rate (% body weight per day) at wh...

Osteocalcin (OC) and matrix Gla protein (MGP) are considered evolutionarily related because they share key structural features, although they have been described to exert different functions. In this work, we report the identification and characterization of both OC and MGP from the Adriatic sturgeon, a ray-finned fish characterized by a slow evolution and the retention of many ancestral featur...

Data from 1238 fishes from 19 sturgeon species and 1 paddlefish were used to analyze heteroplasmy in sturgeon. Lengths of central repeat units ranged from 74 to 83 bp among sturgeon species. No repeat sequence was found in the paddlefish, Polyodon spathula. A general feature of the repeat units was the presence of termination associated sequence (TAS) motifs. About 50% of 138 interspecific muta...

The solubility of protein components in salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) and sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) caviar in distilled water, 5% (w/v) NaCl, 70% (v/v) ethanol at 65C, and 0.2% (w/v) NaOH was determined. The salt soluble proteins were the predominant fraction and constituted 84.2% of the recovered protein in salmon and 86.1% in sturgeon samples. The two most prominent protein fractions (1...

The Sox9 gene of Acipenser sturio, one of the most primitive vertebrates, was analyzed. No sex-specific differences were observed. Sturgeon Sox9 consists of three exons and two introns with completely conserved exon-intron boundaries showing high levels of homology to other vertebrate Sox9 sequences, especially in the N-terminus region containing the HMG box. We found strong evidence for negati...

The effects of oral administration of different doses of estradiol-17 (E2) were examined on the growth performance, body composition, sex steroids, blood indices and histology of liver and gonad in Acipenser stellatus juveniles. Five-months-old fish (40.9 ± 1.1 g) were fed 0, 25 and 50 mg E2 kg diet for 210 1 days. Results showed that increasing doses of E2 caused reduce growth rate. No signifi...

A newly discovered virus, Namao virus, associated with morbidity and mortality, was detected among juvenile lake sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens being propagated by a conservation stocking program for this endangered species in Manitoba, Canada. The outbreaks resulted in cumulative mortalities of 62 to 99.6% among progeny of wild Winnipeg River or Nelson River lake sturgeon and occurred at 2 geog...