In: Ecotoxicology and environmental safety: EES ; official journal of the International Society of Ecotoxicology and Environmental safety, Band 124, S. 96-104
People living a subsistence lifestyle in the Arctic are highly exposed to persistent organic pollutants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Formerly Used Defense (FUD) sites are point sources of PCB pollution; the Arctic contains thousands of FUD sites, many co-located with indigenous villages. We investigated PCB profiles and biological effects in freshwater fish (Alaska blackfish [Dallia pectoralis] and ninespine stickleback [Pungitius pungitius]) living upstream and downstream of the Northeast Cape FUD site on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. Despite extensive site remediation, fish remained contaminated with PCBs. Vitellogenin concentrations in males indicated exposure to estrogenic contaminants, and some fish were hypothyroid. Downstream fish showed altered DNA methylation in gonads and altered gene expression related to DNA replication, response to DNA damage, and cell signaling. This study demonstrates that, even after site remediation, contaminants from Cold War FUD sites in remote regions of the Arctic remain a potential health threat to local residents – in this case, Yupik people who had no influence over site selection and use by the United States military.
In: Ecotoxicology and environmental safety: EES ; official journal of the International Society of Ecotoxicology and Environmental safety, Band 223, S. 112585
In: Brockmeier , E K , Hodges , G , Hutchinson , T H , Butler , E , Hecker , M , Tollefsen , K E , Garcia-Reyero , N , Kille , P , Becker , D , Chipman , K , Colbourne , J , Collette , T W , Cossins , A , Cronin , M , Graystock , P , Gutsell , S , Knapen , D , Katsiadaki , I , Lange , A , Marshall , S , Owen , S F , Perkins , E J , Plaistow , S , Schroeder , A , Taylor , D , Viant , M , Ankley , G & Falciani , F 2017 , ' The role of omics in the application of adverse outcome pathways for chemical risk assessment ' , Toxicological Sciences , vol. 158 , no. 2 , kfx097 , pp. 252-262 . https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfx097
In conjunction with the second International Environmental Omics Symposium (iEOS) conference, held at the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom) in September 2014, a workshop was held to bring together experts in toxicology and regulatory science from academia, government and industry. The purpose of the workshop was to review the specific roles that high-content omics datasets (eg, transcriptomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, and proteomics) can hold within the adverse outcome pathway (AOP) framework for supporting ecological and human health risk assessments. In light of the growing number of examples of the application of omics data in the context of ecological risk assessment, we considered how omics datasets might continue to support the AOP framework. In particular, the role of omics in identifying potential AOP molecular initiating events and providing supportive evidence of key events at different levels of biological organization and across taxonomic groups was discussed. Areas with potential for short and medium-term breakthroughs were also discussed, such as providing mechanistic evidence to support chemical read-across, providing weight of evidence information for mode of action assignment, understanding biological networks, and developing robust extrapolations of species-sensitivity. Key challenges that need to be addressed were considered, including the need for a cohesive approach towards experimental design, the lack of a mutually agreed framework to quantitatively link genes and pathways to key events, and the need for better interpretation of chemically induced changes at the molecular level. This article was developed to provide an overview of ecological risk assessment process and a perspective on how high content molecular-level datasets can support the future of assessment procedures through the AOP framework.