A wide range of environmental factors heavily impact aquatic ecosystems, in turn, affecting human health. Toxic organic compounds resulting from anthropogenic activity are a source of pollution in aquatic ecosystems. To evaluate these contaminants, current approaches mainly rely on acute and chronic toxicity tests, but cannot provide explicit insights into the causes of toxicity. As an alternative, genome-wide gene expression systems allow the identification of contaminants causing toxicity by monitoring the organisms’ response to toxic substances. In this study, we selected 22 toxic organic compounds, classified as pesticides, herbicides, or industrial chemicals, that induce environmental problems in aquatic ecosystems and affect human-health. To identify toxic organic compounds using gene expression data from Daphnia magna, we evaluated the performance of three machine learning based feature-ranking algorithms (Learning Vector Quantization, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines with a Linear kernel), and nine classifiers (Linear Discriminant Analysis, Classification And Regression Trees, K-nearest neighbors, Support Vector Machines with a Linear kernel, Random Forest, Boosted C5.0, Gradient Boosting Machine, eXtreme Gradient Boosting with tree, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting with DART booster). Our analysis revealed that a combination of feature selection based on feature-ranking and a random forest classification algorithm had the best model performance, with an accuracy of 95.7%. This is a preliminary study to establish a model for the monitoring of aquatic toxic substances by machine learning. This model could be an effective tool to manage contaminants and toxic organic compounds in aquatic systems.
Hermissenda emurai is a species of sea slugs in the northwestern Pacific region. In this study, the complete mitochondrial genome of H. emurai (Mollusca: Facelinidae) collected from Korea was recorded. The assembled mitogenome of H. emurai was circular and 13,880 bp in length, including 27.1% A, 15.9% C, 20.5% G, and 36.5% T nucleotide distributions. The overall AT composition was 63.6% while the G-C composition was 36.4%. Phylogenetic analysis according to 12 protein coding genes (atp8 gene excluded) showed that H. emurai clustered with Sakuraeolis japonica in the order Nudibranchia.
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