Application of Ecotoxicogenomics for Understanding Mode of Action of Chemicals and Species Extrapolation

Chemicals released into the environment have a potential to affect various species; therefore, evaluation of the impacts of the chemicals on ecosystems is an urgent issue. However, strategies to evaluate impacts of chemicals on ecosystems have been very limited, because species in the environment are too diverse to establish common strategy for the evaluation. This difficulty can be overcome by applying genomic approaches because genomic information is conserved among various species. Recent advances in toxicogenomics, the integration of genomics into toxicology, can be applied to ecotoxicology, named ecotoxicogenomics. Application of ecotoxicogenomics to Daphnia magna, a small crustacean, proved that it can be used for classification of chemicals. Similar approaches can also be applied to other organisms such as algae. By taking into account gene annotations and other genomic information, these analyses can be helpful to extrapolate the effects of chemicals to other species. Keywords: algae; comparative genomics; Daphnia; DNA; microarray; ecotoxicogenomics