Selecting Optimal Animal Models to Investigate Environmental Toxicology

Within the broad area of toxicology, investigation of environmental toxicology continues to bear great importance to both human and animal populations. The focus of environmental toxicology is assessment of the effects of agents (including physical, chemical and biological agents) on the plants and wild life around us. [http://www. usgs.gov/ecosystems/genetics_genomics/\.gov htdocs_genomics_toxicology. html]We then use this information to assess the health of our environment and ecosystems, and determine how natural catastrophes such as hurricanes and earthquakes as well as industrial production around the world affect ourenvironment. There is ever greater need to assess how acute events as well as chronic situations contributed to environmental pollution and how we can carry out and document remediation efforts. In the past, toxicologists relied on exposures of chemicals and biological agents to rodents, primarily rats, to determine LD50 (lethal dose 50%), dose response curves and to a lesser extent, reproductive and embryonic toxicities. This research provided a great deal of information, but that information is somewhat limited in its applicability to non-mammalian species as well as the ability of these data to address questions concerning the effects of contamination of aquatic ecosystems. To this end, more recent research has emphasized use of various fish species to carry out investigations of environmental toxicology. Three-fourths of the earth’s surface covered by water and there