Progress over the past 30 years has revealed many strengths of the rainbow trout as an alternative model for environmental carcinogenesis research. These include low rearing costs, an early life-stage ultrasensitive bioassay, sensitivity to many classes of carcinogen, a well-described tumor pathology, responsiveness to tumor promoters and inhibitors, and a mechanistically informative nonmammalian comparative status. Low-cost husbandry, for example, has permitted statistically challenging tumor study designs with up to 10,000 trout to investigate the quantitative interrelationships among carcinogen dose, anticarcinogen dose, DNA adduct formation, and final tumor outcome. The basic elements of the trout carcinogen bioassay include multiple exposure routes, carcinogen response, husbandry requirements, and pathology. The principal known neoplasms occur in liver (mixed hepatocellular/cholangiocellular adenoma and carcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma), kidney (nephroblastoma), swim bladder (adenopapilloma), and stomach (adenopapilloma). Trout possess a complex but incompletely characterized array of cytochromes P450, transferases, and other enzymic systems for phase and phase 11 procarcinogen metabolism. In general, trout exhibit only limited capacity for DNA repair, especially for removal of bulky DNA adducts. This factor, together with a high capacity for P450 bioactivation and negligible glutathione transferase-mediated detoxication of the epoxide, accounts for the exceptional sensitivity of trout to aflatoxin B1 carcinogenesis. At the gene level, all trout tumors except nephroblastoma exhibit variable and often high incidences of oncogenic Ki-ras gene mutations. Mutations in the trout p53 tumor suppressor gene have yet to be described. There are many aspects of the trout model, especially the lack of complete organ homology, that limit its application as a surrogate for human cancer research. Within these limitations, however, it is apparent that trout and other fish models can serve as highly useful adjuncts to conventional rodent models in the study of environmental carcinogenesis and its modulation. For some problems, fish models can provide wholly unique approaches.Environ Health Perspect 104(Suppl 1): 5-21 (1996)

Using zebrafish, Danio

We exposed embryos (83 hours postfertilizaton) and fry (3 weeks posthatch) to N -methyl-N' -nitro-N -nitrosoguanidine (MNNG) by immersion in aqueous solutions of 0-10 ppm for 1 hour (embryo) or 0-2 ppm for 24 hours (fry). Zebrafish

No abstract

Progress over the past 30 years has revealed many strengths of the rainbow trout as an alternative model for environmental carcinogenesis research. These include low rearing costs, an early life-stage ultrasensitive bioassay, sensitivity to many classes of carcinogen, a well-described tumor pathology, responsiveness to tumor promoters and inhibitors, and a mechanistically informative nonmammalian comparative status. Low-cost husbandry, for example, has permitted statistically challenging tumor study designs with up to 10,000 trout to investigate the quantitative interrelationships among carcinogen dose, anticarcinogen dose, DNA adduct formation, and final tumor outcome. The basic elements of the trout carcinogen bioassay include multiple exposure routes, carcinogen response, husbandry requirements, and pathology. The principal known neoplasms occur in liver (mixed hepatocellular/cholangiocellular adenoma and carcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma), kidney (nephroblastoma), swim bladder (adenopapilloma), and stomach (adenopapilloma). Trout possess a complex but incompletely characterized array of cytochromes P450, transferases, and other enzymic systems for phase I and phase II procarcinogen metabolism. In general, trout exhibit only limited capacity for DNA repair, especially for removal of bulky DNA adducts. This factor, together with a high capacity for P450 bioactivation and negligible glutathione transferase-mediated detoxication of the epoxide, accounts for the exceptional sensitivity of trout to aflatoxin B1 carcinogenesis. At the gene level, all trout tumors except nephroblastoma exhibit variable and often high incidences of oncogenic Ki-ras gene mutations. Mutations in the trout p53 tumor suppressor gene have yet to be described. There are many aspects of the trout model, especially the lack of complete organ homology, that limit its application as a surrogate for human cancer research. Within these limitations, however, it is apparent that trout and other fish models can serve as highly useful adjuncts to conventional rodent models in the study of environmental carcinogenesis and its modulation. For some problems, fish models can provide wholly unique approaches.

Assessment of human cancer risk from animal carcinogen studies is severely limited by inadequate experimental data at environmentally relevant exposures, and procedures requiring modeled extrapolations many orders of magnitude below observable data. We used rainbow trout, an animal model well suited to ultra low-dose carcinogenesis research, to explore dose-response down to a targeted 10 excess liver tumors per 10,000 animals (ED001). A total of 40,800 trout were fed 0–225 ppm dibenzo[a,l]pyrene (DBP) for four weeks, sampled for biomarker analyses, and returned to control diet for nine months prior to gross and histologic examination. Suspect tumors were confirmed by pathology, and resulting incidences were modeled and compared to the default EPA LED10 linear extrapolation method. The study provided observed incidence data down to two above-background liver tumors per 10,000 animals at lowest dose (that is, an un-modeled ED0002 measurement). Among nine statistical models explored, three were determined to fit the liver data well - linear probit, quadratic logit, and Ryzin-Rai. None of these fitted models is compatible with the LED10 default assumption, and all fell increasingly below the default extrapolation with decreasing DBP dose. Low-dose tumor response was also not predictable from hepatic DBP-DNA adduct biomarkers, which accumulated as a power function of dose (adducts = 100 * DBP1.31). Two-order extrapolations below the modeled tumor data predicted DBP doses producing one excess cancer per million individuals (ED10−6) that were 500–1500-fold higher than that predicted by the five-order LED10 extrapolation. These results are considered specific to the animal model, carcinogen, and protocol used. They provide the first experimental estimation in any model of the degree of conservatism that may exist for the EPA default linear assumption for a genotoxic carcinogen.

No abstract

The potential anti-carcinogenic effects of tomatine, a mixture of commercial tomato glycoalkaloids alpha-tomatine and dehydrotomatine (10:1), were examined in the rainbow trout chemoprevention model. Prior to the chemoprevention study, a preliminary toxicity study revealed that tomatine in the diet fed daily at doses from 100 to 2000 parts per million (ppm) for 4 weeks was not toxic to trout. For the tumor study, replicate groups of 105 trout were fed diets containing dibenzo[a,l]pyrene (DBP) alone (224 ppm), (N = 3), DBP plus tomatine at 2000 ppm (N = 2), tomatine alone (N = 2), or control diet (N = 2) for 4 weeks. The fish were then returned to control diet for 8 months and necropsied for histopathology. Dietary tomatine was found to reduce DBP-initiated liver tumor incidence from 37.0 to 19.0% and stomach tumor incidence from 46.4 to 29.4%. Tomatine also reduced stomach tumor multiplicity. The tomatine-containing diets did not induce mortality, change in fish weights, or liver weights. No adverse pathological effects in the tissues of the fish on the tomatine diets were observed. Dose-response and chemopreventive mechanisms for tomatine protection remain to be examined. This is the first report on the anticarcinogenic effects of tomatine in vivo.