Integrative environmental genomics of Cod (Gadus morhua): the proteomics approach

Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) is an essential species in North Atlantic fisheries and increasingly relevant as an aquaculture species. However, potential conflicts with both coastal industry and petroleum industry expanding into northern waters make it important to understand how effluents (produced water, pharmaceuticals, food contaminants, and feed contaminants) affect the growth, reproduction, and health of this species in order to maintain a sustainable cod population and a healthy human food source, and to discover biomarkers for environmental monitoring and risk assessment. The ongoing genome sequencing effort of Atlantic cod has opened the possibility for a systems biology approach to elucidate molecular mechanisms of toxicity. Our study aims to be a first step toward such a systems toxicology understanding of genomic responses to environmental insults. A toxicogenomic approach was initiated that is combining data generated from proteomics analyses and transcriptomics analyses, and the concurrent development of searchable expressed sequence tags (EST) databases and genomic databases. This interdisciplinary study may also open new possibilities of gene annotation and pathway analyses.