Willmor Pena 10/30/2011

Evolutionary change to toxicants in a Hudson River fish The Hudson River has been being contaminated with a lot of dioxins and PCBs over 30 years until 1977, and is now considered America s largest superfund site, the PCBs attached to the river sediment and accumulated downstream. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are hydrocarbons that consist of chlorine atoms attached to two benzene rings, furthermore there are 209 congeners of PCB, which have different location and number of chlorine atoms. There are three types of PCBs; one is chlorinated in one or more ortho positions, ortho positions refer to the position closest to the single bond joining the benzene rings, the other, has chlorine atoms in only one ortho position and the last one does not have any chlorine atoms at the ortho positions; these PCBs are called co planar PCBs and they have similar effects of dioxins. These pollutants have had a great effect on the fish population in the river. One species survived these contaminants and seemed to have resistance to them. Dr. Isaac Wirgin along with other researchers has been working on this research for more than ten years to show that this species, the tomcod, experienced a rapid evolutionary change. In the north east many of the tomcods that were caught showed imperfections on their bodies, some were missing jaws others had a twisted spinal cord and most of them had dead tissue all over their livers, but the tomcods in the Hudson River didn t have any of that. It was clear that there was something different about the tomcod in the Hudson River. The researchers focused on a marker gene, cytochrome, this gene expresses itself when tomcods are exposed to PCBs and other hydrocarbons. Tomcods from the Hudson River, shinnecok bay and from Canada s miramichi river were exposed to PCBs. In the fish that were not from the

Willmor Pena 10/30/2011

Hudson River the gene started expressing itself but the fish of the Hudson River did not show any sign of the marker. Furthermore the behavior of the fish was compared and the behavior of the fish outside the Hudson was different when exposed to PCBs whereas tomcod from the Hudson were normal and healthy. They repeated the experiment with younger fish and exposed them to PCBs; fish outside the Hudson showed body imperfections as they matured into adults missing jaws curved spinal cords and decreased longevity were observed. To find why these tomcods had this trait of immunity to PCBs, they mapped the genome of the tomcod and found that a piece of the genetic code was missing, and this piece was present on the genetic code of the tomcods outside the Hudson. The genetic code was missing two amino acids; this deletion affected the structure of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor gene, responsible of mediating the toxicity of toxicants, making the fish a 100 times less sensitive to PCBs. These tomcods that didn t have those two amino acids were able to survive the toxicants and become immune to them and they reproduced and passed on this trait to their offspring while the others that did have the amino acids died off leaving the tomcod population. This was a great example of survival of the fittest. This evolutionary change observed on tomcods is absolutely amazing because it takes thousands of years for evolution to occur within a population, and they experienced it in a period of 50 to 100 years. With this research it was proven that tomcod had undergone rapid evolutionary change due to toxicants in the Hudson River.