Toxic assessment of environmental contaminant chemicals using DNA microarrray

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We conducted the screening of gene expression under exposures of environmental contaminant chemicals in order to detect biological response against these chemicals. This study deals with gene expression against methylmercury exposure, especially low-dose, perinatal periods using DNA microarray.Methylmercury is known as neurotoxicant especially in the development period. MeHg enters the aquatic food chain to become the predominant dietary source of mercury in humans. The highest levels of MeHg are found in predatory fish and sea mammals. As the exposure level is low, it is necessary to consider the various confounding factors. In this study, we choose the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as confounding factor, and investigated the effect of combined exposure to methylmercury and PCBs. Because main sources of human methylmercury exposure are fish, bioconcentrated PCBs exposure which have strong neurotoxicity also occurs. These chemicals are ingested mainly through fish consumption, but little is known about the hazardous effects.In this study, we investigated the gene expression on mouse brain of the MeHg exposed group, the PCBs exposed group, or, co-exposure to MeHg and PCBs during perinatal periods using DNA microarray technique. We applied extracted total RNA sample from brain of exposed animals to the DNA microarray. Then we carried out analysis of plenty of data according to bioinformatics methodologies. We classified the categories of expression genes and characterizing the gene expression profiling under the tree groups ; MeHg exposure group, PCB exposure group, MeHg-PCB co-exposure group.