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High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry-based Metabolomics for Translating Exposure Effects Across Species
Citation:
Evich, M., J. Mosley, J. Doering, G. Ankley, K. Fay, Dan Villeneuve, Tim Collette, AND D. Ekman. High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry-based Metabolomics for Translating Exposure Effects Across Species. 2018 SETAC NA Annual Meeting, Sacramento, Ca, November 04 - 08, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presented at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 39th annual meeting in Sacramento, CA.
Description:
Chemical exposures often pose dramatically different health risks in fish depending on the species being investigated. These disparities are often due to differences in metabolism, excretion, exposure route, and a host of other species-specific traits. However, due to time and resource limitations, toxicity studies are often restricted to a small subset of species, and thus may fail to capture all potential risks. Unfortunately, many current approaches for measuring adverse effects are not designed for making evaluations across species. Among the ‘omics approaches, metabolomics is particularly well suited to cross-species assessments, because it does not require genome sequences. Furthermore, in addition to evaluating impacts on endogenous biochemicals (the metabolome), metabolomics is increasingly being used to monitor anthropogenic contaminants in exposed organisms, including their metabolism and excretion, thus expanding its use for understanding exposures as well as effects. Finally, a variety of biological matrices that can be sampled non-lethally (skin mucus) contain rich metabolomic information allowing for: 1) the repeated sampling of individuals, 2) the use of larger sample sizes to better evaluate resident populations and 3) the study of threatened or endangered species, for which lethal sampling is forbidden. Here we report the use of high-resolution mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to explore effects of exposure to the model aromatase inhibitor, fadrozole, in four fish species: Japanese medaka, fathead minnow, zebrafish and mosquitofish. As an initial focus, results of skin mucus are presented, reporting the measurement of distinct metabolomics profiles across these four species and the complex molecular processes observed in response to fadrozole exposure. In addition, skin mucus samples from phyologenetically-diverse non-model fish species were evaluated to determine the potential for using non-lethal metabolomics to monitor environmental exposures in highly disparate species. Robust and species-specific metabolomic profiles were detectable in the skin mucus of all species analyzed providing strong evidence that species-specific adverse effects can be monitored using this metabolomics approach. As a whole, these investigations demonstrate that metabolomics responses may provide unique perspectives into cross-species exposure sensitivity, the molecular basis for this diversity and important non-lethal approaches for making such determinations.
