Aquatic Environment Health Assessment-the Ecotoxicogenomic Challenges

Abstract

During the last two decades, the knowledge on gene structure and function, enormous amount of nucleotide sequence information have accumulated due to the remarkable advances in molecular biology. These advances make it possible to evaluate the biological responses against environmental changes at subcelluar level by genomewide gene expression analysis for prognostic risk assessment, namely environmental genetic toxicology or called as ‘Ecotoxicogenomics’. The field of ecotoxicogenomics is rapidly growing and proof-of-principle studies are urgently needed to assess the potential of genomics technologies in ecotoxicology. However, almost all the organisms in nature are less traditional model systems and genomewide gene expression data are not available. To overcome the limitation, several challenges (e.g., differential display PCR, subtractive cDNA library construction, heterologous hybridization, and target gene isolation) have been carried out. In this presentation, four topics; 1) new marine test fish development, 2) environmental stress responsive gene isolation in soft coral, 3) differential gene expression in red alga, 4) phenotype changes in hydra regarding to positional value alteration; following the strategies above mentioned will be discussed. Finally, the ‘Ecoepigenetics’ a new approach for accessing environmental changes will also be introduced.