Positive clones were confirmed for inserts by colony PCR and 3–4 clones per bacterial isolate were picked for sequencing analysis (Macrogen, Korea). The nucleotide sequence data were subjected to BLAST sequence analysis against NCBI databases for bacterial identification. One reference isolate named “China” that had previously been confirmed to cause AHPND by the laboratory assay ( Tran et al., 2013) was kindly provided by Robins McIntosh from Charoen Pokphand Co. Ltd. This isolate was obtained from a shrimp pond exhibiting early mortality in Hainan Island, China in August 2010. An additional reference isolate of V. parahaemolyticus originated from shrimp pond sediment in 2008 from Phang-Nga province, long before reports of AHPND and was obtained from the Faculty of Public Health, Mahidol University.