es401082h_si_002.xlsx (38.32 kB)
Analysis of the Elodea nuttallii Transcriptome in Response to Mercury and Cadmium Pollution: Development of Sensitive Tools for Rapid Ecotoxicological Testing
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posted on 2013-08-06, 00:00 authored by Nicole Regier, Loïc Baerlocher, Martin Münsterkötter, Laurent Farinelli, Claudia CosioToxic
metals polluting aquatic ecosystems are taken up by inhabitants
and accumulate in the food web, affecting species at all trophic levels.
It is therefore important to have good tools to assess the level of
risk represented by toxic metals in the environment. Macrophytes are
potential organisms for the identification of metal-responsive biomarkers
but are still underrepresented in ecotoxicology. In the present study,
we used next-generation sequencing to investigate the transcriptomic
response of Elodea nuttallii exposed
to enhanced concentrations
of Hg and Cd. We de novo assembled more than 60 000
contigs, of which we found 170 to be regulated dose-dependently
by Hg and 212 by Cd. Functional analysis showed that these genes were
notably related to energy and metal homeostasis. Expression analysis
using nCounter of a subset of genes showed that the gene expression
pattern was able to assess toxic metal exposure in complex environmental
samples and was more sensitive than other end points
(e.g., bioaccumulation, photosynthesis, etc.). In conclusion, we demonstrate
the feasibility of using gene expression
signatures for the assessment of environmental contamination, using
an organism without previous genetic information. This is of interest
to ecotoxicology in a wider sense given the possibility to develop
specific and sensitive bioassays.
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Sensitive Toolstrophic levelsecotoxicologyfood web60 000Hgmetal homeostasisElodea nuttallii Transcriptome60 000 contigsgene expression patternRapid Ecotoxicological TestingToxic metalsElodea nuttalliiCadmium PollutionFunctional analysisExpression analysistranscriptomic responseend pointsgene expression signaturesorganismmetal exposure
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