Marine research in Aachen - with a fresh water model organism

Oil spills in cold Baltic and Arctic Sea waters are a special challenge to investigate, and hence they are the research focus of our new EU H2020-funded collaborative project "Integrated oil spill response actions and environmental effects - GRACE". The project is coordinated by Kirsten Jörgensen of SYKE in Helsinki, Finland, and made it successfully through a two-stage process. This means that not only the initial project draft has been considered sufficiently good by a couple of reviewers, but also the then submitted full proposal received positive reviews.

In the project we strive together with our partners from Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Norway, Greenland, Sweden and Canada to comprehensively investigate the environmental impact of oil spills and provide measures for mitigation. Our part will be to establish the zebrafish as a model organism for oil spill detection and assessment. This brings a number of challenges:

1. The zebrafish is a fresh water organism. Any effects of oil constituents have to be related to marine environments, including the impact of temperature and salinity. We will make comparisons to parallel experiments with marine stickleback to calibrate our model to the Baltic and Arctic Sea.
2. We will develop a biosensor based on fish larvae behaviour that can travel on a ferry and make online measurements. The device will trigger an alert upon changes in behaviour and lead to more detailed effect-based investigations using reportergen assays.
3. By means of a broad battery of assays and together with other partners of the project we intend to derive toxicity fingerprints of oil contaminations.

I am leader of the work package on the bioanalytical investigations. Two PhD students will work on the biosensor and the zebrafish model, respectively.

The whole project aims at developing novel tools and strategies for oil spill response, and increase the knowledge on the distribution, mobility, severity, impact and possibilities for mitigation of oil contaminations.

More information can be found later on the official project website, the project webpage of our institute and several press releases.

Currently, further information is available in a press release by SYKE.

Once more I happened to design the logo.

The EDA guide to surviving environmental analysis

Colleague Werner Brack at the UFZ in Leipzig, Germany is an outstanding expert on effect-directed analysis (EDA). EDA stands for an analytical approach that uses chemical and biological analysis to identify single contaminants as the culprits for toxicity in environmental samples.

It combines the best of both worlds. The ability to detect effects and the power to identify as well as elucidate molecule structures are interconnected by a sophisticated fractionation. The EDA principle is easily explained: (1) samples are tested for their effects in one or more bioassays, (2) effective samples are fractionated and fractions tested again, (3) effective fractions are further fractionated and tested, and finally (4) the substances in the few remaining effective fractions are chemically identified.

While sounding quite easy, EDA can be highly complex effort, due to the multitude of options for experimental design. Which bioassays should be used for screening, which biological effect should be targetted? How to properly fractionate the samples, for a most succesful separation of the compounds of interest? What techniques and methods are suitable for structure identification and elucidation?

These and many other crucial questions form a seemingly uncontrolled network of possibilities, that makes EDA a major challenge in environmental toxicology and chemistry. Werner however set out to tame this beast. He invited a large number of colleagues to write a comprehensive overview article about all aspects involving and impacting experimental design in EDA. We were among the lucky ones he asked to contribute to "Effect-directed analysis supporting monitoring of aquatic environments — An in-depth overview".

A nature protocol on dioxin-like activity

Dioxin-like activity is an important biomarker for the contamination with several of the most prominent pollutants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB), and Polychlorinated Dibenzodioxins and -furans (PCDD/F).

We have longstanding experience with measuring this activity using a variety of different assays. 

Maybe this is why we were asked by nature protocols to write an article about the bioanalysis of dioxin-like activity. Since nature protocols publishes detailed procedures for laboratory techniques, we decided to communicate why and how to use the micro-EROD assay with the H4IIE permanent rat liver cell line.

The main reason for choosing this particular assay was its peak performance in a direct comparison of alternative bioassays we conducted earlier.

The whole exercise led to a nice article about the "Determination of the CYP1A-inducing potential of single substances, mixtures and extracts of samples in the micro-EROD assay with H4IIE cells".