Arsenic reduces gene expression response to changing salinity in killifish

Toxicogenomic approaches can detect and classify adverse interactions between environmental toxicants and other environmental stressors but require more complex experimental designs and analytical approaches. Here we use novel toxicogenomic techniques to analyze the effect of arsenic exposure in wild killifish populations acclimating to changing salinity. Fish from three populations were acclimated to full strength seawater and transferred to fresh water for 1 h or 24 h. Linear models of gene expression in gill tissue identified 31 genes that responded to osmotic shock at 1 h and 178 genes that responded at 24 h. Arsenic exposure (100 μg/l) diminished the responses (reaction norms) of these genes by 22% at 1h (p = 1.0 e-6) and by 10% at 24 h (p = 3.0 e-10). Arsenic also significantly reduced gene co-regulation in gene regulatory networks (p = 0.002, paired Levene's test), and interactions between arsenic and salinity acclimation were uniformly antagonistic at the biological pathway level (p < 0.05, binomial test). Arsenic's systematic interference with gene expression reaction norms was validated in a mouse multi-stressor experiment, demonstrating the ability of these toxicogenomic approaches to identify biologically relevant adverse interactions between environmental toxicants and other environmental stressors.