Marine embryoTox

PHALLUSIA MAMMILLATA

A new direction in the team led us to develop toxicity tests based on imaging of marine invertebrate embryos (Phallusia mammillata and Mytilus galloprovincialis). We have so far devised a battery of molecular and morphometric toxicological tests based on imaging of the transparent Phallusia mammillata larva (Dumollard et al., 2017; Gomes et al., 2019a, Gazo et al., 2021). These tests are able to detect and distinguish general teratogenicity, neurodevelopmental toxicity and genotoxicity. For example, we discovered that low doses of xenoestrogen bisphenol A (BPA) induce neurodevelopmental toxicity in both species, Phallusia mammillata and Mytilus galloprovincialis (Gomes et al., 2019b; Miglioli et al., 2021). Whereas exposure to higher doses of BPA (40 µM) induce genotoxicity (Gomes et al., 2019b).

Figure 1: graph abstract toxico

MYTILUS GALLOPROVINCIALIS

We have most recently developped a new embryonic model for toxicity testing in collaboration with the laboratory of Prof Laura Canesi (DISTAV, University of Genoa). Using molecular and biochemical techniques on large scale embryonic cultures of the Mediterrannean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis (Miglioli et al., 2019), we are assessing the impact of climate change (Kapsenberg et al., 2018), or chemical pollution on shell and neural development of this mussel species (Miglioli et al., 2021).