SEB Bulletin January 2008
Contents
Animal Symposium 2007
This year Animal Section symposium was held at Franklin-Wilkins Building, King's College London situated close to the South Banks of the River Thames. The symposium brought together 45 delegates from 16 different countries stretching from Nigeria to North America. This international diverse group had an enjoyable few days in London hearing a variety of talks covering many aspects of metal biology in the aquatic environment and biota. The opening Inaugural lecture entitled “Whence metal ecotoxicology? Exploiting integrative concepts” was kindly provided by Sam Luoma (The US Geological Survey) who gave an integrated assessment of metal speciation and exposure routes in determining metal toxicology.
The proceeding two days was split into themes that covered Metal Homeostasis, Metal Chemistry, Metal Nutrition, Metal Speciation and Metal Toxicity. The Metal Homeostasis session was dominated by presentations that used modern “omic” approaches to understand regulatory mechanisms that govern internal metal homeostasis and toxicity. Peter Kille (Cardiff University) gave an overview of the genome resources available to the metallo-biologist, Christer Hogstrand (King's College London) focused on zinc metabolism in fish and Stephen Sturzenbaum on the genomic responses of nematodes to toxic metals. The Metal Nutrition session focused on metals in feeds for aquaculture and both Simon Davies (Plymouth Univeristy) and Anne-Katrine Lundebye (NIFES, Norway) gave excellent state of the art lectures on the current knowledge on how best to improve bioavailability in feeds to improve productivity.
The Metal Chemistry session specifically addressed the issue of metal availability in the aquatic environment. Both Raewyn Town (Univeristy of Southern Denmark) and Andrew Turner (Univeristy of Plymouth) have a chemistry background that challenged the ideas of many of the biologically orientated audience and thus provided “food for thought”. The Metal Speciation session moved from the aquatic environment to what is happening to metal speciation at biological membranes and within the organism. Ronny Blust (Antwerp University) provided details of uptake kinetic parametres for metals across membranes and partitioning within tissues.
This was excellently complemented by Phil Rainbow's (Natural History Museum) talk on intracellular metal speciation in marine invertebrates and included the other fascinating fact about barnacles that they store zinc in granules that may account for 2% of there body weight. The Metal Toxicity session included an excellent review of the Biotic Ligand Model (BLM), a model developed to predict acute metal toxicity and hopefully chronic toxicity in the future, by Jim McGeer (Wilfrid Laurier University); another view of lead toxicity in aquatic organisms and how genomics can be used to ascertain mode-of-action by Martin Grosell (Univeristy of Miami) and Gretchen Bielmyer (University of North Florida) provided a lovely overview of copper’s effect on scleractinian corals off the Florida Keys.
In addition we had 22 posters to peruse during coffee and lunch breaks. Two awards were given to Elise Rotureau (Wageningen University) for her clear presentation on “Dynamic metal sorption by charged polysaccharides” and to Chris Pook (University of Plymouth) for his poster on “The metabolic cost of resistance to copper in Nereis diversicolor measured as scope for growth”. Not all of the time was spent in the lecture theatre and we had a delightful symposium diner at the The Strand Palace Hotel. The organizers would like to thank the generous supported provided by Rio Tinto and NIPERA. Finally, we were supposed to be joined by our third organizer Inna Sokolova, but she was unable to make it because she gave birth to a baby girl prior to the start of the conference. We wish mother and baby well.
Nic Bury and Richard Handy
SEB Animal Section