Assessing variation in the potential susceptibility of fish to pharmaceuticals, considering evolutionary differences in their physiology and ecology.

ABSTRACT: Fish represent the planet's most diverse group of vertebrates and they can be exposed to a wide range of pharmaceuticals. For practical reasons, extrapolation of pharmaceutical effects from 'model' species to other fish species is adopted in risk assessment. Here, we critically assess this approach. First, we show that between 65% and 86% of human drug targets are evolutionarily conserved in 12 diverse fish species. Focusing on nuclear steroid hormone receptors, we further show that the sequence of the ligand binding domain that plays a key role in drug potency is highly conserved, but there is variation between species. This variation for the oestrogen receptor, however, does not obviously account for observed differences in receptor activation. Taking the synthetic oestrogen ethinyloestr

SUBMITTER: Brown AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4213588 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature