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Immune competence assessment in marine medaka (Orzyias melastigma)—a holistic approach for immunotoxicology

  • Advances in Toxicity Assessment
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Abstract

Many anthropogenic pollutants in coastal marine environments can induce immune impairments in wild fish and reduce their survival fitness. There is a pressing need to establish sensitive and high throughput in vivo tools to systematically evaluate the immunosuppressive effects of contaminants in marine teleosts. This study reviewed a battery of in vivo immune function detection technologies established for different biological hierarchies at molecular (immune function pathways and genes by next generation sequencing (NGS)), cellular (leukocytes profiles by flow cytometry), tissues/organ system (whole adult histo-array), and organism (host resistance assays (HRAs)) levels, to assess the immune competence of marine medaka Oryzias melastigma. This approach enables a holistic assessment of fish immune competence under different chemical exposure or environmental scenarios. The data obtained will also be useful to unravel the underlying immunotoxic mechanisms. Intriguingly, NGS analysis of hepatic immune gene expression profiles (male > female) are in support of the bacterial HRA findings, in which infection-induced mortality was consistently higher in females than in males. As such, reproductive stages and gender-specific responses must be taken into consideration when assessing the risk of immunotoxicants in the aquatic environment. The distinct phenotypic sexual dimorphism and short generation time (3 months) of marine medaka offer additional advantages for sex-related immunotoxicological investigation.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to Joseph Humble and Michael Chiang for technical assistance. The work described in this paper was supported by a grant from the UGC Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 9041943; CityU 160013) and grants from the SKLMP and SUMB (Project No. ZDSYSY20140509155229806), CityU 7004393. The author DWT AU is grateful to the support of the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies (KOFST) for the award of a Brain Pool Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory in Marine Pollution, Department of Biology and Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Roy R. Ye, Drew R. Peterson, Frauke Seemann & Doris W. T. Au

  2. Centre for Marine Environmental Studies, Ehime University, Matsuyama, 790-8577, Japan

    Shin-Ichi Kitamura

  3. Department of Biological Science, College of Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, South Korea

    J. S. Lee

  4. Department of Biomedical Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Terrance C. K. Lau

  5. School of Biomedical Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong

    Stephen K. W. Tsui

  6. Shenzhen Key Laboratory for the Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity, Research Centre for the Oceans and Human Health, Shenzhen Research Institute, City University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, 518057, China

    Doris W. T. Au

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  1. Roy R. Ye
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  2. Drew R. Peterson
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  3. Frauke Seemann
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  4. Shin-Ichi Kitamura
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  5. J. S. Lee
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  6. Terrance C. K. Lau
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Correspondence to Doris W. T. Au.

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Ye, R.R., Peterson, D.R., Seemann, F. et al. Immune competence assessment in marine medaka (Orzyias melastigma)—a holistic approach for immunotoxicology. Environ Sci Pollut Res 24, 27687–27701 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-016-7208-x

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