Meeting the Challenges of Aquatic Vertebrate Ecotoxicology

摘要

The field of ecotoxicology uses biomarkers to assess the health of populations of sentinel organisms and to determine risk associated with environmental chemicals. The tools of modern biology are being used to develop promising new suites of biomarkers that must be rigorously tested and validated within a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of how toxic chemicals in the environment influence basic physiology and behavior. The zebrafish is a well-established laboratory model organism with a well-equipped molecular toolbox for basic biology and biomedicine with logical applications in ecotoxicology. As a model organism for ecotoxicology, the zebrafish can be used to develop mechanistic models of gene-environment interactions that will provide a foundation for the development of genomic resources in other fish species. Integration of mechanistic molecular data from multiple fish species will lead to the development of integrated dynamic models that will enable better diagnosis and treatment of environmental disease and improved ecological risk assessments.nnAn understanding of the impacts of harmful chemicals at the population, community, and ecosystem levels is the primary aim of ecotoxicology. The ability to diagnose the health effects of toxic chemicals at these scales, primarily in nonhuman organisms, often hinges on biomarkers, characteristics that can be objectively assessed as an indicator of a pathophysiological state. Because of the increasing use of gene products as biomarkers, ecotoxicology is one of the many biologically based scientific fields that will advance dramatically in the next few decades, thanks to technological innovations in the detection of biomolecules and continued rapid developments in computing. The grand challenge in ecotoxicology is to develop integrated dynamic models of the relationships among organismal-, population-, and ecosystem-scale changes that incorporate fundamental physical, chemical, and biological processes along varied temporal, organizational, and spatial scales, from high-frequency molecular dynamics to decadal regional and global changes (figure 1). Biologically based systems are inherently nonlinear and stochastic, making the mathematical, statistical, and computational challenges of such an endeavor quite formidable (Hastings et al. 2005). Many subsets of this modeling task have commenced in separate fields but need to be integrated for the purposes of ecotoxicology to make predictions of ecological change on the basis of efficiently acquired environmental and biomarker data.