The establishment of soil pollution estimation method by gene profiling

针对不同终点的各种生物测定方法已被应用于评估含有各种化学物质和金属的土壤。然而，细胞对化学物质的反应是以复杂的方式调节的，土壤往往是各种化学物质的复杂混合物。因此，需要全球分析方法来阐明化学品或复杂混合物(如受污染的土壤)对整个细胞或生物体的毒性作用模式。最近发展起来的DNA微阵列使我们能够同时测量数百到数千个基因的表达，与经典的毒理学方法相比，在全面了解和预测毒性方面取得了重大进展。分析了酵母细胞对污染土壤的全基因组响应，以阐明其毒性作用模式。我们还试图建立一种新的生物检测方法，利用线虫的表达模式来检测环境化学物质。本研究利用DNA微阵列技术对约9000个基因进行分析，观察重金属影响下的基因表达谱变化，并通过聚类和统计的方法确定特异的反应基因。

Various bioassays targeting different endpoints have been applied to assess the soil containing various chemicals and metals. However, the cellular responses to chemicals are regulated in complicated manner and the soil is often a complex mixture of variety of chemicals. Therefore, method for global analysis is required to elucidate toxic mode of action for chemicals or complex mixture such as polluted soils on whole cells or organisms. Recently developed DNA microarray enables us to simultaneously measure the expression of hundreds to thousands of genes, providing significant advances in the comprehensive understanding and prediction of toxicity compared with classical toxicology approaches. The genome-wide responses of yeast cells to polluted soils were analyzed to elucidate the toxic mode of action. We also attempted to establish a novel bioassay to detect environmental chemicals using expression pattern in C.elegans. In this study, we analyzed about 9000 genes to observe the gene expression pattern change by the effect of heavy metal using DNA microarray, and determined the specific response genes by cluster and statistic methods.