Assessing the effects of emerging contaminants to fishes native to North America using proteomic profiling

Current environmental risk assessment approaches rely on animal tests which are tedious, expensive, and of ethical concerns. This is constituting a significant problem for governments and industries as they are mandated to test the tens-of-thousands of chemicals currently used by society globally. This serves as impetus to develop novel alternative approaches that enable high-throughput testing of chemicals while being predictive and not relying on live animals, all of which are characteristics of ‘omics technologies. My thesis project is conducted under a Genome Canada Large Scale Research Project termed EcoToxChip (http://www.ecotoxchip.ca/) that aims to develop an advanced tool for the characterization and prioritization of environmental chemicals in support of chemical risk assessment. Specifically, my thesis research utilizes whole transcriptome and proteome analyses to characterize the molecular toxicity pathways of 8 model contaminants of concern, and which informs the development of the EcoToxChips. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Markus Hecker

Student:

Partner:

Masaryk University

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Saskatchewan

Program: