Caenorhabditis elegans as a Test Model in Environmental Toxicology

Dear Colleagues,

Beginning in the 1970s, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans emerged as an important animal model for a variety of biological fields including neurobiology, developmental biology, and genetics. Much of the early work with C. elegans focused on its genetic manipulability and describing its developmental cycle and nervous system. C. elegans’ use in these areas was supported by its ease of culturing, small body size, and short life cycle. These characteristics led to an expansive basic knowledge of its biology including the mapping of its nervous system and characterization of its genome. It also served as the model organism for mapping the human genome. In the 1980s, these same features led researchers to begin to use it as a test organism in environmental toxicology. Initially, studies were performed on agar, but later methods were developed for water, sediment and soil exposure. The development of these methods allowed C. elegans to be used to both assess the toxicity of chemicals under a realistic environmental exposure in the laboratory.

This Special Issue aims to assemble pioneering research exploring the range of uses of C. elegans within the broad field of environmental toxicology including its use for the rapid screening of the toxicity of chemicals found within the environment. The collection of papers in this issue covers a wide range of toxicants—including heavy metals, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and emerging concern substances, such as nano- and microplastics. The genetic tools available C. elegans (i.e., the use of mutant strains; omics) allow for the organism to expand the findings beyond just phenotypic toxicity but to include the identification of specific mechanisms of action at the sub-organismic level.  

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Studies using elegans to assess the environmental impact of chemical exposures in a field setting using standardized protocols;
• Linking laboratory toxicity studies with higher tier studies (e.g., microcosms) or field studies;
• Mechanistic studies using elegans to assess environmental toxicant-induced disruptions;
• Studies exploring new exposure methods for using elegans in environmental toxicology, including high-throughput screening, automated phenotyping, and CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing;
• Comparative toxicology and the cross-species relevance of findings with elegans;
• Toxicity studies for new, emerging substances (e.g., microplastics, PFAS, nano-pesticides), exploring various toxicity mechanisms;
• Exploring the influence of confounding environmental factors (e.g., climate change) on the outcome of toxicity studies with C. elegans.

Prof. Dr. Phillip L. Williams
Dr. Sebastian Höss
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Caenorhabditis elegans
• environmental toxicology
• exposure methods
• emerging environmental exposures
• sediment toxicity
• soil toxicity
• toxicity mechanism
• high throughput testing
• omics
• emerging anthropogenic substances