Effort to link bioassays to biological impacts in fish expands to San Gabriel River

SCCWRP and its partners have expanded their effort to understand how bioanalytical cell screening technology can be used to provide early evidence that chemical contaminants in river water are potentially triggering adverse biological impacts in fish.

The study, which kicked off in September at four sites along the San Gabriel River, will examine the relationship, or linkage, between how bioanalytical assays respond to exposure to bioactive CECs in the river water, and how living fish respond to the same contamination.

Unlike similar, earlier work in the Los Angeles River – where laboratory-grown fish were placed in mobile exposure chambers set up along the riverbank – researchers will analyze fish caught in the San Gabriel River.

As with the L.A. River study, researchers will conduct tissue integrity analyses and gene biomarker analyses on the fish, and look at how these data correlate with results from bioanalytical assays, which are designed to screen for potential endocrine disruption and carcinogenicity in aquatic life.