Multi-gene evaluation of hepatic transcript expression in the sentinel fish Lithognathus mormyrus exposed to a battery of pollutants

The demersal fish Lithognathus mormyrus was introduced recently as a sentinel species, detecting biological effects of pollutants present in its natural sandy habitat. Hepatic pollutant-affected transcripts were used as biomarkers. A study aimed at identifying novel pollutant-affected genes, and constructing an operational cDNA microarray used as a multi-gene biomonitoring tool was carried out. The RNA populations were isolated from fish injected with a battery of pollutants, including Aroclor 1254, 17 β-estradiol, CdCl₂, perfluoro octanoic acid, Lindane, benzo(a)pyrene, tributyl tin chloride, methylmercury chloride, and 4-nonylphenol. cDNA representations were equalized and they were biased towards enrichment of pollutant-affected genes. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the Symposium "Pollutant Responses in Marine Organisms" (Allesandria, Italy 6/19-23/2005).