Integration of Genotoxic Biomarkers in Environmental Biomonitoring Analysis Using a Multi-Biomarker Approach in Three-Spined Stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus Linnaeus, 1758)

Abstract

Water is impacted by a variety of increasing pressures, such as contaminants, including genotoxic pollutants. The proposed multi-biomarker approach at a sub-individual level gives a complementary indicator to the chemical and ecological parameters of the Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000/60/EC). By integrating biomarkers of genotoxicity and erythrocyte necrosis in the sentinel fish species the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) through active biomonitoring of six stations of the Artois-Picardie watershed, north France, our work aimed to improve the already existing biomarker approach. Even if fish in all stations had high levels of DNA strand breaks, the multivariate analysis (PCA), followed by hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC), improved discrimination among stations by detecting an increase of nuclear DNA content variation (Etaing, St Rémy du Nord, Artres and Biache-St-Vaast) and erythrocyte necrosis (Etaing, St Rémy du Nord). The present work highlighted that the integration of these biomarkers of genotoxicity in a multi-biomarker approach is appropriate to expand physiological parameters which allow the targeting of new potential effects of contaminants.

DNA damage and shell malformation in Blue Mussel, <i>Mytilus edulis</i>

“…Comet assay is a sensitive, simple, flexible, rapid, and inexpensive technique for detecting DNA damage as DNA strand breaks in an individual cell of almost any eukaryotic organism (Azqueta & Collins, 2013;Cvetković et al, 2018;Tatin et al, 2021). Due to its ability and practical advantages, this assay has already been used as a genotoxicity test for various genotoxicants both direct and indirect-acting (Erraud et al, 2018;González et al, 2018;Gajski et al, 2019;Cordelli et al, 2021;Rajendran et al, 2021) for various aquatic organisms from vertebrate (Žegura & Filipič, 2019;Camargo Filho et al, 2022;Cant et al, 2022;Costa, 2022;Gazo et al, 2022;Mahboob et al, 2022) to invertebrate (Erraud et al, 2018;Khan et al, 2019;Guidi et al, 2021;Cosentino et al, 2022;Ivorra et al, 2022) Mussels (Mytilus edulis and their relatives) are a very common aquatic invertebrate species that have been used as sentinel organisms in aquatic environment monitoring since Goldberg (1975) has proposed the Mussel Watch program. Mussels were thought to fulfil what was required by environmental monitoring principles because of their behaviour as a sessile organism, wide geographical distribution, availability, and resistance to general stress.…”