Toxicology

Biography

Biography: Michael B Morgan

Abstract

Cnidarians do not have endocrine organs; however they are capable of responding to signaling molecules such as hormones. Endocrine disruption has been suspected in cnidarians but no direct hormone interaction has been identified. Regulatory pathways associated with hormone bio synthesis and signaling are essentially uncharacterized in cnidarians. Representational Difference Analysis (RDA) is a differential gene expression technique that can successfully be applied to cnidarians experiencing stress. The objective of this study was to isolate transcripts that were responsive to a sublethal exposure of estradiol. The sea anemone Exaiptasia pallida was exposed to 20 µg/l estradiol for four hours. Results identify transcripts that appear to have functional significance related to steroid exposure. Results presented also demonstrate how small labs with limited financial resources can use RDA coupled with Quantitative Real-Time PCR (qPCR) to perform transcriptional analyses in hypothesis driven experiments to identify potentially important biomarkers of stressor-specific exposures. Conclusions will discuss how human pharmaceuticals through sewage treatment effluent are representative of a class of anthropogenic stressors capable of impacting aquatic invertebrates.