Stickleback as a model fish
The
three-spined stickleback is a small teleost
fish species. Habitats stretch from full marine to
freshwater bodies across the whole of the Northern hemisphere. It
is one of the few endemic and ubiquitous species in Europe that
offers scope for environmental monitoring.
It has a number of advantages as a model species in
ecotoxicology:
- Stickleback are small, easy to keep and can reproduce under
laboratory conditions.
- It is sensitive to environmentally relevant levels of
contamination.
- It has unique traits for the detection of endocrine-disrupting
chemicals, such as a genetic sex marker and a xenoandrogen-specific
endpoint (the kidney glue protein, spiggin).
- The stickleback genome is fully sequenced and number of
molecular resources exist, such as microsatellites and cDNA
microarrays.
We have been conducting research for a number of years using
stickleback. In 2008, Dr Ioanna Katsiadaki received a
grant worth nearly £400,000 from the Home Office-supported NC3Rs to conduct research into
endocrine-disrupting chemicals whilst reducing the number of
animals used in ecotoxicological testing.