The nematode C. elegans as an integrated toxicological tool to assess water quality and pollution

CLAVIJO, ARACELI; CALVO, D.; MUNARRIZ, ELIANA; KRONBERG, M. FLORENCIA; MOYA, ALDANA; MORÁBITO, J.; ROSSEN, A.; PAGANO, EDUARDO

Montevideo

Congreso; Expanding Caenorhabditis elegans research: First Latin American Worm Meeting; 2017

Latin American Society for Developmental Biology

Determination of water quality status in rivers is critical to establish a sustainable water management policy. For this reason, over the last decades it has been recommended to perform integrated water assessments that include waterquantities and physicochemical, ecological and toxicological tests. However,sometimes resources are limited and it is not possible to perform large-scalechemical determinations of pollutants or conduct numerous ecotoxicological tests. To overcome this problem we use and measure the growth, as a responseparameter, of the soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to assess water qualityin rivers. The C. elegans is a ubiquitous organism that has emerged as animportant model organism in aquatic and soil toxicology research. The TunuyánRiver Basin (Province of Mendoza, Argentina) has been selected as a representative traditional water monitoring system to test the applicability of the C. elegans toxicological bioassay to generate an integrated water quality evaluation. Jointly with the C. elegans toxic assays, physicochemical and bacteriological parameters were determined for each monitoring site. C. elegans bioassays help to identify different spatio-temporal water qualities in the river basin. Multivariate statistical analysis (PCA and linear regression models) has allowed us to confirm that traditional water quality studies do not predict potential toxic effects on living organisms. On the contrary, physicochemical and bacteriological analyses explain less than 62% of the C. elegans growth response variability, showing that ecotoxicological bioassays are important to obtain a realistic scenario of water quality threats. Our results confirm that the C. elegans bioassay is a sensible and suitable tool to assess toxicity and should be implemented in routine water quality monitoring.