PARENT SESSION
SA3 - Molecular/Cellular Toxicology
Chair: Schlenk, Dan1, 1 University of California-Riverside, Riverside, CA
8:00 AM to 12:00 PM - Sunday, 17 November 2002
Room Ballroom H
(022) Comparative Proteomic Analysis of Mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) Livers from a Creosote Contaminated Site .
Andacht, Tracy*,1, Winn, Richard2, 1 University of Georgia, Proteomics Resource Facility, Athens, GA, USA2 University of Georgia, Warnell School of Forest Resources, Athens, GA, USA
ABSTRACT- Analysis of global molecular responses to environmental stressors is critical to understanding chemically-induced diseases. A population of mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) that live in a creosote contaminated site in the Elizabeth River, VA (Atlantic Wood) exhibit a high frequency of hepatic neoplasms. Several groups have reported alterations in expression of enzymes involved in xenobiotic activation and detoxification in the liver of these creosote-resistant mummichog. We sought to examine the global molecular response of the liver from Atlantic Wood fish using 2D differential gel electrophoresis and MALDI mass spectrometry analysis. The expression profile of livers from a reference population were compared to those collected from Atlantic Wood by CyDye (Amersham Bioscences) pre-labeling whole liver extracts prior to gel electrophoresis. Similarly, livers without visible lesions were compared to those with lesions from the creosote-resistant fish. Proteins with a 4-fold increase or decrease in expression were excised and digested with trypsin, and peptide mass fingerprints and sequence information were acquired using the 4700 Proteomics Analyzer (TOF/TOF, Applied Biosystems). The expression of approximately forty proteins were found to be consistently altered in the Atlantic Wood fish. This approach has resulted in the identification of several novel proteins that appear to be involved in chemical resistance and chemically-induced cancers. These results illustrate that comparative proteomics can be a valuable tool to understanding disease processes by providing a platform from which to generate new hypotheses.
Key words: proteomics, Fundulus, creosote, liver