BioProject

Accidental spills of chemical or oil tankers such as Levoli Sun or Prestige have recently impacted the European seas. More...

Accidental spills of chemical or oil tankers such as Levoli Sun or Prestige have recently impacted the European seas. The analysis of the genes regulated by exposure to spilled chemical substances could help elucidating adaptatory and compensatory pathways that may participate in pathogenesis in marine biota. Hepatic expression profiles of male juvenile S. maximus exposed to a nº2 fuel-oil (FO) and to styrene were studied employing a turbot custom microarray containing 2715 3’-UTR biassed single-sequences, many of them unannotated. Hybridisations identified 169 and 293 genes significantly regulated after 3 and 14 days of exposure to FO, respectively. Typical PAH responsive genes such as AhRR, ARNT2, CYP1A1 and GST were significantly upregulated. Exposure significantly affected genes involved in protein metabolism, synthesis being the most regulated pathway with ribosomal proteins and various translation factors overexpressed. Protein synthesis could participate in compensatory pathways after FO induced protein damage. Additionally, two weeks of exposure resulted in the upregulation of ras pathway genes. Regarding styrene, gene expression was very variable within experimental groups and only 2 genes were significantly regulated after 3 days of exposure. After 1 week of exposure styrene modified the expression levels of 44 genes. Most highly regulated genes, that may constitute new biomarkers of exposure to styrene, included those coding for estrogen-responsive finger protein, transmembrane 9 superfamily member 4 or selenoprotein-T, but the only pathway found to be significantly regulated was once again that of protein synthesis. Funded EU project PRAGMA, Spanish MEC (CANCERMAR), Basque Government (Consolidated Research Groups GIC07/26-IT-393-07). Overall design: Turbots were exposed to fuel-oil and to seawater control: 7 turbots in Control tank and 8 in Oiled tank. After 14 days of exposure turbots were in situ dissected and liver was extracted, inmersed in RNAlater and frozen in liquid N2 Less...