Evolutionary Toxicology and Genomics: Utility of Natural Populations’ Sensitivity and Resistance Mechanisms to Persistent Organic Pollutants in Ecological Risk Assessment and Public Health | Biomedgrid

Susceptibility to toxic chemical exposures is determined by genotype-environment interactions. Genetically variable natural populations live in spatially, temporally, and chemically complex environments, and their exposures to persistent organic pollutants should be carefully considered when quantifying evolution's role in mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance. Although most natural populations' genomes are not sequenced, reasonably robust lower-throughput custom platforms and data imputation methods help infer missing genotypes and improve the analysis of non-model organisms' sequencing data. Such datasets yield insights about population processes and variance of allelic diversity within and between sensitive and resistant populations. The advantage of this approach is that an a priori choice of biomarkers of an adverse effect is not necessary. Population genomics provide insights into the sequence variations that define differences in gene expression and protein polymorphisms underlying mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance to polluted environment. Complementary “omics” approaches with model-organism and natural populations offer a better understanding of biological effects and should be an integral component of comprehensive ecological and human health risk assessment