Invitation Hydra to ecotoxicogenomics

Abstract

The knowledge on gene structure and function, enormous amount of nucleotide sequence information have accumulated due to the remarkable advances in molecular biology during the last two decades. 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 genetic toxicology or called as ‘Ecotoxicogenomics’. The paradigm have sought to establish which chemicals cause damage to ecosystem in the last century are now shifting to understand the mechanisms of toxicity to different wildlife species in new millennium. In this sense, Hydra magnipapillata is a powerful candidate for this purpose, since about 165,000 ESTs are accumulated in public database; genome project has been initiated and about 1.2 Gb nucleotides have accumulated so far; and finally the most of genes and pathways are conserved through the evolutionary history. The results of small scale analysis of transcript level changes response to environmental chemicals will be discussed as the initial phase of the invitation.