ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Clinical, Anatomical, and Comparative Pathology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1580744
Capillary Zone and Agarose Plasma Protein Electrophoresis in the Sand Tiger Shark (Carcharias taurus)
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami, Miami, United States
- 2New York Aquarium, Wildlife Conservation Society (United States), New York, New York, United States
- 3NC Aquariums, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
- 4Georgia Aquarium, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- 5Marine Science Research Center, Ripley's Aquariums, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, United States
- 6Delaware Biotechnology Institute, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, United States
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Protein electrophoresis is a tool used in the health assessments of non-mammalian vertebrates.In elasmobranchs, agarose gel electrophoresis (AGE) has been described in various species and a newer method called capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) has been developed and implemented in the undulate skate (Raja undulata) and nursehound shark (Scyliorhinus stellaris). The study goals were to implement AGE and CZE methods on plasma samples from the sand tiger shark (Carcharias taurus) and examine differences in resolution as well as to calculate reference intervals (RI). Plasma was obtained from aquarium sharks (n = 23) and freeranging sharks (n=62) sampled during field research conducted from 2017-2023. As with previous reports, CZE was found to provide superior resolution with definition of two major globulin migrating fractions compared to AGE. Overall, the alpha and beta migrating fractions were well correlated between the methods (r = 0.92, 0.89, respectively, p < 0.0001). The correlation for the gamma fraction was weaker (r = 0.42, p = 0.002) as the CZE fraction was lower in concentration versus AGE. There were minor, but significant, differences between the concentration of some of the fractions in samples from sharks under managed care versus freeranging animals which necessitated the production of two sets of RI. In total, this information may help in further studies to address the applicability of these tools in the management of this species under human care as well as in health assessments of free-ranging sharks.
Keywords: acute phase response, Carcharias taurus, capillary zone electrophoresis, elasmobranch, Lipoproteins, Protein electrophoresis, Sand tiger shark
Received: 21 Feb 2025; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 CRAY, Soto, Hyatt, Christiansen, Lyons and Wyffels. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: CAROLYN CRAY, Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami, Miami, United States
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