Quantifying community metabolomes within model freshwater ecosystems and their responses to pollutants

The University of Birmingham (UoB) is an international leader in OMICS TECHNOLOGIES and SYSTEMS TOXICOLOGY, achieved by pooling its expertise and capacity in omics and bioinformatics with specialists in toxicology, systems biology and chemical regulation. Our mission statement commits to offering leadership in the development and application of omics- and bioinformatics-based solutions, enabling evidence-based chemical safety science to safeguard both human and environmental health.

Current ECOLOGICAL RISK ASSESSMENT of chemicals relies on standardised OECD tests on typically three isolated plant and animal species. This lack of realism is widely recognised as a central failure of environmental legislation. QUANTITATIVE MODEL ECOSYSTEMS have the potential to revolutionise ecological risk assessment by enabling molecularly reproducible experiments on ecologies that "develop" along predictable trajectories. Characterising the extent to which those trajectories are perturbed by pollutants would provide fundamental new metrics of pollutant impacts on ecosystems. Furthermore, when coupled with discovery-driven OMICS technologies, quantitative model ecosystems could for the first time enable discovery of stress response MECHANISMS (and subsequently diagnostic markers of pollutant impacts) within realistic environments of interacting sediment microbes, algae, higher plants, invertebrates, etc.

METABOLOMICS is a proven technology for discovering mechanisms of how organisms respond to stress. UoB is a world leader in the development and application of metabolomics to quantify pollutant impacts on isolated species, with a particular focus on aquatic organisms. Our recent NERC-funded work has for the first time utilised metabolomics to discover a toxicity pathway spanning two species across two trophic levels. Here we propose to partner with Thermo Fisher Scientific to:

(1) establish and optimise novel sampling and non-targeted LC-MS metabolomics techniques to characterise community metabolomes within model freshwater ecosystems that comprise of many species,

(2) examine the temporal stability of metabolic processes in these model systems,

(3) quantify the impacts of pollutants on baseline community metabolism, and

(4) disseminate via multiple channels including through our partnership with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and through our membership of OECD Extended Advisory Group on Molecular Screening and Toxicogenomics.