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2E - Genomics, Proteonomics, Metabolomics (TUP/111) Evaluating Alternatives to the Use of Fish for Environmental Assessments. Quill, Shane , Whale, Graham, Eadsforth, Charles, ABSTRACT- Companies have an obligation to ensure that materials used or produced in their operations are assessed for their safety to protect the workforce, consumers, neighbours and the environment against adverse effects. There is an increasing awareness of the need to reduce the use of animals in laboratory experiments where other reliable means of establishing the safety of products are available. This paper describes and evaluates existing as well as potentially new approaches to the current legal requirements regarding the use of fish in environmental hazard and risk assessments. Ultimately, it is envisaged that success in finding acceptable alternatives to fish could also have a potential tie-in with the acceptability of mammalian surrogates. Current ecotoxicological alternatives to fish include microbiotests, toxkits, standardised algal and invertebrate tests, in vitro assays (e.g. fish cell lines), QSAR (Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships), and genomics. Our assessment indicates that fish can potentially be replaced by the use of a multi-trophic test battery that incorporates fish cell lines with existing Daphnia and algae data along with QSAR predictions. In the longer term, developments in genomic technologies and microbiotests appear to have the potential to improve our understanding of modes of toxic action thereby reducing reliance on in vivo toxicity assessments with fish. Although these alternative approaches have been proposed, changes to the current situation regarding fish tests will not occur unless constructive debate is initiated between relevant stakeholders. Options as to how the debate regarding the use of fish in environmental research can be furthered will also be discussed in this presentation. Key words: fish, Ecotoxicology, in vivo, in vitro |
