engleski

The humble sea urchin in the Nano-cene: the gift that keeps on giving

The sea urchin has found widespread use as a model in fields ranging from biology to immunology. For example, not only has it provided fundamental insight into developmental biology since the 19th Century but aspects of the functioning of its immune system have been noted to be analogous to that of humans. Urchins had also found an important niche in toxicology research for indicating the broad-spectrum presence of pollutants in aquatic environments. Over recent decades research on the impact of a broad range of chemicals and materials of anthropogenic origin has increasingly turned to cell lines or cultures, including their new incarnation as 3D cultures, which have gradually come to the fore. As such approaches have begun to supercede testing at the whole organism level it has become tempting to overlook reasons for investigating the toxicological impacts of chemicals at the organism level. While testing chemicals on cell cultures has its advantages, not least of which the ability to achieve relatively good reproducability and high-throughput, a vast wealth of information can be lost should testing at higher levels of biological organisation be ignored. Indeed, adverse outcomes at the cellular level do not always reflect in similar outcomes at the whole organism level, particularly as data from cells do not take into consideration all of the diverse metabolic pathways and defence mechanisms in the organism in toto. Addressing this, results deriving from a wide range of endpoints in urchin bioassays, including embryotoxic, spermiotoxic and cytotoxic outcomes that provide important, unique and complementary data to those that may be derived from cell-based assays are highlighted.

adverse outcome pathways ; particles ; pesticides ; whole organism testing

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