Sandra Infante Villamil

Intestinal and environmental microbiome community analysis in farmed black tiger and banana shrimps as a tool for prawn health and production biomonitoring

Sandra Infante Villamil is undertaking her PhD into how dynamic changes in bacterial communities in Australian shrimp farms can be strong determinants of productivity outcomes.

Sandra completed a BSc. (Hons) in Marine Biology (2010) at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Colombia, where she started working in aquaculture research. In Australia, she completed a Masters in Science at James Cook University (2015), and her minor project investigated the effect of diet on the gut microbial community in a mouse model. In 2016, Sandra became a member of the ARC Research Hub for Advanced Prawn Breeding where she started researching the relationships between bacterial communities in black tiger shrimp, shrimp health and pond productivity.

Her current project aims at finding bacterial signatures that can be used as early predictors for changes in productivity in the two Australian shrimp commercial species Penaeus monodon (black tiger shrimp) and Fenneropenaeus merguiensis (banana shrimp).

#aquaculture #shrimp #microbiome #FISH