Environmental Genomics
Environmental health
Waste is an inevitable product of society but pollution should not be. NERC set a challenge to develop tools and technologies that will allow people to make better assessments of environmental risk, including identifying new and improved indicators of ecosystem health.
In the latter part of the 20th century people sought to identify chemicals which damaged ecosystems so that their use could be restricted or prevented. Environmental genomics is now unravelling the ecologically important mechanisms of toxicity and determining why some pollutants are more toxic than others.
Environmental genomics supports conservationists and environmental managers by providing tools to determine the health of wildlife populations and identify susceptible individuals. Researchers envisage that these tools will eventually reduce the number of animals, such as fish, that are currently used in regulatory assessments.
Pollution
Current approaches to assess the potential impact that pollutants have on aquatic and terrestrial organisms rely on measuring the responses, such as mortality, growth and reproduction, of whole organisms.
Whilst these approaches are useful for identifying certain chemical pollutants, they provide little knowledge about the mechanisms of toxicity. Integrating a genomic approach helps to identify these mechanisms and address some key challenges:
- predicting the influence of single and multiple exposures to pollutants on the growth and sustainability of wildlife populations.
- determining the impact of low dose pollutant exposure, including chemical cocktails or mixtures, such as sewage effluents, on the health of wildlife populations.
- predicting responses to toxins across a very broad diversity of wildlife and estimating how changes at different levels of the food chain affect the structure of ecosystems.
Details are available from the pages below:
Disease
Outbreaks of disease and the emergence of new diseases can be major threats to natural ecosystems as well as to human health. The spread or emergence of diseases can be driven by environmental conditions, in particular climatic fluctuations or human disturbance, and genetic changes in the disease organisms themselves.
Environmental genomics can help us investigate how environmental conditions affect the susceptibility of host organisms to disease. It can also be used to reveal how disease organisms respond to environmental change at a genomic level.
Details are available from the pages below: