Department of Biology, University of Turku, Finland.
Aquat Toxicol. 2011 Oct;105(3-4 Suppl):16-24. doi: 10.1016/j.aquatox.2011.05.019. Epub 2011 Jun 23.
Toxicological responses of an organism are disturbances of function. This as a starting point we review and discuss issues that we consider important in applying functional genomics to aquatic toxicology. Functional genomics includes all the steps in gene expression pathway. Thus, ultimately the goal is to relate genome information to protein activity. In ecotoxicogenomics the toxicological responses must further be combined with responses to natural environmental changes. We focus on fish, but also consider commonly used invertebrates, mainly Daphnia. We first go through the toxicologically important features of genomes of aquatic animals, and then review the reference gene approach to quantify transcript amount. Thereafter we emphasize the need to relate the mRNA and protein levels, and protein activity of individual genes. Finally we discuss how functional genomic investigations may be important in resolving current environmental problems and give our views of valuable future research topics.
生物体的毒理反应是功能的紊乱。我们从这一起点出发，综述并讨论了我们认为在将功能基因组学应用于水生毒理学方面非常重要的问题。功能基因组学包括了基因表达途径的所有步骤。因此，最终目标是将基因组信息与蛋白质活性联系起来。在生态毒基因组学中，毒理反应必须进一步与对自然环境变化的反应结合起来。我们专注于鱼类，但也考虑了常用的无脊椎动物，主要是水蚤。我们首先研究水生动物基因组中具有毒理学意义的特征，然后综述定量转录物量的参考基因方法。此后，我们强调需要将单个基因的 mRNA 和蛋白质水平以及蛋白质活性联系起来。最后，我们讨论了功能基因组学研究如何在解决当前环境问题方面具有重要意义，并给出了我们对有价值的未来研究课题的看法。
