| Project Detail |
The EU-2030 Biodiversity Strategy (COM/2020/380) aims to ensure Europe’s biodiversity will be on the path to recovery by 2030. Freshwater fish are among the taxa most-threatened by extinction in Europe, with a decline proven in abundance and biomass in most common European freshwater fish species.
For Europe’s biodiversity to be on the path to recovery, researchers, environmental managers and policy makers must identify and mitigate environmental factors and anthropogenic pressures that impact freshwater fish populations.
Chemical pressures are impacting 38% of European surface water. Among the 56 priority hazardous substances monitored in the EU-regulation in surface water, more than one third of them are classified as carcinogenic or suspected to be carcinogenic for humans. These substances may induce embryotoxicity, abnormal development, metabolic disorders and long-term initiation and promotion of carcinogenic pathways in fish species. There is a need to ascertain what ecological risks result from the exposure of aquatic organisms to genotoxicants in the environment, as well as a need to urgently develop innovative diagnostic tools to assess ecological risks in EU surface water.
As proteins play a critical role in tumorigenesis, onco-proteomics has become a growing field in medical cancer research. In this project, we aim to develop next-generation biomarkers for two European endemic freshwater fish species by leveraging emerging high-throughput proteomics methods. Through lab and field experiments, we aim to identify toxicity pathways and relevant biomarkers in fish exposed to genotoxicants as well as relevant biomarker responses that are induced early, before individuals’ survival is threatened. This project will not only pioneer the use of diagnostic tools developed for medical research in the discipline of freshwater fish ecology but will also apply these tools in the field by measuring genotoxicant exposure of native fish populations in the Rhone River basin. |
