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Grant backs study on how tropical fish adapt to toxins in their diet
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Posted on Aug 29 2011
Jason Biggs, PhD, a professor at the University of Guam Marine Lab, received a $106,000 grant award from the National Science Foundation to study how tropical fish, and specifically rabbitfish, adapt to toxins in their diet.
“Next-generation DNA sequencing technology will be used to characterize every single gene expressed in the liver of rabbitfish (sesyon), a very culturally important food fish for Micronesia. These genes will be used to build state-of-the-art technology that can measure the liver’s responses to changing environments, and provide an opportunity to define diet-driven adaptive mechanisms in tropical fish for the first time,” said Biggs.
Marine organisms discharge complex toxic chemicals to defend themselves and to avoid being eaten. So when tropical fishes consume their prey they often consume these toxic chemicals along with their meal. It is important to understand how predators cope with poisons in their diet and how these systems parallel humans’ ability to remove foreign chemicals, like drugs and pollutants, that are encountered in their everyday lives. Little is currently known about how fish tolerate their prey’s biochemical defenses—especially in tropical marine communities, where these mechanisms can be assumed to be most complex.
“Increasing our understanding of how tropical fishes’ cope with dietary toxins can contribute to resource-management efforts for minimizing impacts from harmful algal blooms, global climate change, and land-based pollution. For people who depend on the ocean for food, understanding why some natural products persist in marine food chains and how pollutants can affect a fish’s ability to survive, are equivalent to understanding the size, safety, and sustainability of their most important resource,” says Biggs.
For more information contact Jason Biggs at biggs.js@uguam.uog.edu. [B][I](UOG)[/I][/B]
