Phenotype anchoring of silver exposed algae

Understanding biological responses to toxic substances is important for pollution assessment and monitoring exposure to existing environmental contamination. Ecotoxicological research focuses mainly on measureable endpoints such as mortality, reproduction and growth however a major challenge is to understand the toxic mechanisms at a molecular level and how these molecular changes relate to functional changes at the organism and population level.

Our research deals with the analyses of metal induced alterations in gene and protein expression in the algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a model organism, and anchoring of the changes to specific phenotype. This study encompasses the composite fields of conventional toxicology, genetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics. The analysis of differential gene expression using the high throughput methodology of microarray will resolve the transcriptome signature, molecular function, biological processes and cellular components involved in the response to silver exposure. The transcriptome studies will result in a greater understanding of the mechanism of toxicity and serve as a guide in search for specific responses in proteomics and metabolomics analyses. The reverse genetics method of RNAi will help us determine probable silver sensitive and resistant proteins. The combined and integrated data on gene, protein, metabolic and phenotypic changes collected in context of exposure dose and time will predict the effect of silver on the individual organism and population.
This project is closely related to the project Systems biology.