Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Everyone is concerned about the state of our environment. This grant is a request for financial support to develop and test new ways to assess the effects of pulp and paper mill effluents on fish reproduction. It is already known that some mill effluents inhibit reproduction in fish in the wild and in laboratory studies. Efforts to identify the chemicals responsible for these effects has been difficult and of limited success. This research is crucial so that pulp processing or waste disposal procedures could be changed to eliminate or reduc the effects of these substances. We propose to use a novel approach to assess the effects of effluents with the goal of identifying the chemicals that inhibit reproduction in fish. We will determine the effects of environmentally relevant levels of effluents on thousands of genes in the brain. This technique is called cDNA expression array analysis, the so-called "gene chip" approach to measure levels of gene expression in tissues. We study the brain because it is the central controller of reproductive hormone production and fertility in animals. We propose the novel hypothesis that these effluents disrupt normal brain function and this is what leads to failure in reproduction. We also use new biological assays to help detect the active chemicals in effluents. This is called bio-assay guided fractionation of the pulp mill effluents. We plan to use goldfish and the fathead minnow (indigenous fish found in Canadian waters) as model species fort these studies, because we have lots of information on their reproductive physiology, they are easy to keep. It is important to note that our partners in Environment Canada and at the Canadian Pulp and Paper Research Institute are critical team members that have extensive experience with pulp mill effluent research and can translate our findings into potential new guidelines and policies, and changes in industry wastewater management strategies. Under the framework of this proposal, young Canadian researchers will interact with our contributing partners from governmental agencies, NGGs and the private sector. These graduate students and postdoctoral researchers will be trained to work in the emerging discipline of Environmental Genomics.