3rd EcotoxicoMic Webinar
Thursday, October 11, 2018 (10:30 am, Paris Time Zone)
Webinar Registration: click here
Dr Floriane LARRAS
(Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany)
Integrating functional OMICs in microbial ecotoxicology and environmental risk assessment
In the environment, organisms are exposed to anthropogenic pressures which are known to potentially induce structural and functional changes. Little is known about the involved biochemical pathways supporting specific functions but the recent raise of OMICs approaches opens the perspective in ecotoxicology to explore pathways involved in such functions. However, most of a priori ecological risk assessment (ERA) tools are based on apical endpoints (e.g. growth, photosynthesis) but do not necessarily ensure the protection of these functions nor enable the integration of OMICS data. But working with such approaches comport several challenges such as: extracting valuable information from big datasets and interpret the meaning of those new data compared to the more classical one (apical endpoint). The potential and the added-value of OMICs responses in ecotoxicology and risk assessment was first explored via a case study based on the responses of the chlorophyte Scenedesmus vacuolatus to the biocide triclosan. The responses were explored at different levels such as the metabolome, the transcriptome, the growth and the photosynthesis along 5 different concentrations of triclosan and a new tool aiming to build complex dose-response curves and to derive sensitivity values was developed for that purpose. The talk will illustrate along this example the integration of the complex dataset for ERA.