Abstract
Water treatment plants are often not effective in removing pharmaceuticals, personal care products or natural hormones from their effluents. To test the effects of these effluents on fish, we exposed male fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) for 48 h to effluents at two sites, one up-stream and the other down-stream from a water treatment plant. Gene expression profiling showed that significant changes occurred in the gonad of fish exposed below, compared to above the treatment plant and to laboratory control fish. Among the biological processes affected were the innate immune response, response to stress, control of homeostasis, control of transcription, metabolism, and cell communication. This work suggests that fish are impacted by exposures to the sewage treatment effluents and effects can be detected rapidly by gene expression profiling.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 134-136 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| Journal | Marine Environmental Research |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2008 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work is the result of research sponsored by the Minnesota Sea Grant College Program supported by the NOAA Office of Sea Grant, United States Department of Commerce, under Grant No. NA03OAR4170048. The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for government purposes, not withstanding any copyright notation that may appear hereon. This paper is journal reprint No. JR545 of the Minnesota Sea Grant College Program. Also, by a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Sciences and Technology (EX-2004-0986) to NGR. ND holds equity in EcoArray, a company commercializing the arrays.
Keywords
- Gene expression profiling
- Pharmaceuticals
- Sewage treatment plants
