A European eel-specific microarray of 14,913 cDNAs was generated and used to identify genes involved in response to pollutants by comparing the expression profiles of 23 individuals from heavily-polluted (Tiber, 8 males) and lowly-polluted (Bolsena, 7 males and 8 females) environments.
Moreover, due to short life span, easy to quantitative determination and rapid response to pollutants algae act as a bioindicator of water quality changes.
This organ has been generally associated with response to pollutants, particularly with detoxification of xenobiotics.
The coordinated activation of different stress mechanisms is a fundamental element of the overall response to pollutants and to other potentially deleterious external inputs [ 1].
Second, it is suggested that the response to pollutants of microbe-mediated ecologic processes be used to quantitate the sensitivity of different ecosystems to various toxicants.
Rather than characterizing the potential evolutionary response of a given C. elegans population to novel environmental conditions we were interested in examining the global evolutionary patterns that could occur in response to pollutants.
Genome-scale approaches have the potential for identifying genes and genetic networks that underlie ecologically important traits, such as those linked to adaptation to cold temperatures [ 5], defense mechanisms [ 6] or response to pollutants [ 7, 8].
Since differences in the expression of sex-linked genes could interfere with the identification of genes involved in response to pollutants, two separate analyses were conducted in parallel (1) considering only males and (2) with both males and females included.
Our approach aims at identifying genes involved in the response to pollutants by means of a comparative analysis of gene expression between environments with a varying level of pollution.
