Every February, the Biology Department hosts our annual Graduate Research Day. This day is a celebration of the research that MSc and PhD students undertake in Biology research labs and is a great opportunity to see all of their amazing accomplishments. GRD is a full day of science with posters, presentations and a 3 minute thesis session.

MSc students Max Hendershot and Hunter Herron gave excellent presentations, focused on their research on CYP3A65 and CYP1s, respectively. Both are leveraging our in vitro data with expressed proteins to identify substrates of their respective enzymes. These compounds are then used in vivo to examine the effects of chemical metabolism on toxicity phenotypes in developing zebrafish. MSc Molly Dobrik had a great poster explaining her research plans for Fish Embryo Toxicity (FET) testing in zebrafish, fathead minnow, rainbow trout and walleye to compare the species sensitivity to PFAS precursors.

Congratulations to all the students sharing their research. A very big congratulations to Max for his best presentation award!

I’m thrilled to announce the release of toxdrc on CRAN, (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/toxdrc/index.html), an extension of the drc package currently available in R. The drc package has long been used to support dose-response analysis in R, but it is challenging to use efficiently with large, complex datasets that require the analysis of many dose-response curves simultaneously, either in the form of different experiments, replicates, or different endpoints within the same test. Workflows can often become quite complex to work around these challenges. The newly deployed toxdrc aims to alleviate these pinch points by offering a pipeline function, `runtoxdrc`. This function is a one-stop shop for dose response modelling, point estimation, and can handle preliminary data transformations (blank correction, relative response calculation, validity criteria, solvent effects, etc). This package was designed to have a simple interface and transparent calculation; all intermediate steps of these functions can be viewed and are stored throughout the pipeline function. Additionally, this package does not make any assumptions about column names, allowing it to adapt to any long-form data. If you are interested in using this package, we invite you to read the publicly available readme at https://github.com/jsalole/toxdrc. Similarly, bug reports can also be made at the same repository https://github.com/jsalole/toxdrc/issues.

While outside of the designed scope, this package is also able to analyze enzyme activity data, which will interest users who generate large in vitro datasets.

Toxdrc is one of the practical outputs of the MSc of Jack Salole, who has returned to the WilsonToxLab for his PhD!

A giant congratulations to Max Hendershot for the publication of his undergraduate research in the WilsonToxLab! Max worked in the lab in summer after his 3rd year and did his 4th year thesis in the lab, before starting his MSc. Max’s research was with former PhD student Andrea Murillo Ramos and in collaboration with former PDF Andrew Thompson. Together, Andrea and Andrew designed a locomotory behavioural assay for our polychaete worms. Max’s project focused on extending this assay from adults into juveniles, which was needed if we were going to use this assay in the long run. Adult worms are large, so the original assay was in petri dishes, and our colony is really female biased, so trying to generate enough males to look at sex effects is super challenging. Instead, we moved the assay to juveniles in a plate based assay, which allows higher throughput.

Max’s project focused on trying to understand what neurochemical modulation could alter locomotion, using modulators of the dopamine, serotonin, GABA and acetylcholine pathways. This sets the stage for the lab to consider the impact of environmental contaminants that might alter these pathways. Check out his study “The marine worm Capitella teleta is sensitive to neurochemical manipulation, as revealed via a novel behavioural tool” in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. Its open access!

Every December, the Biology Department gathers for a holiday party that is hosted by the physiologists: the McClelland, Scott, Choy, Little, and of course, WilsonToxLab. This holiday gathering, called Fish Nog, is a long tradition in Biology and the entire department really turns out. It is a fun event for our labs, with students organizing and contributing to the advertisement of Fish Nog. We all bring in some food to share, so the department is well fed. The physiology labs’ students also spend the early afternoon decorating our lounge, get the music going, and generally making sure that when the department arrives, everyone feels like they are walking into a party in progress. Of course, they also make sure the lounge is cleaned up after the party! Thanks to Hunter, who was the lead form our lab and made sure we had good music!

Of ocurse, we took the opportunity to get together and take a photo of the group. It was great to see some former students (in person & joining virtually!). Graduate students Jack, Molly, Emily, Hunter and Max were all there but also our UG trainees Lucas, Maddie, Clarice, and Ally. Raveena and Emily (on the phone) were in the lab last year. So glad they could join us. Alex Little is not there twice (although he is a twin…) but the students used his photo as a tree topper, and he snuck in behind us to join in!

With the recent publication in the Journal of Experimental Biology, MSc student Mellissa Easwaramoorthy was featured in an ECR spotlight! Mellissa’s paper was entitled Elevated temperature during rearing diminishes swimming and disturbs the metabolism of yellow perch larvae. This research was from her undergraduate research in the lab, where she was involved in studies where we reared yellow perch embryos at different temperatures. Mellissa started as a 3rd year student in the lab, worked as a summer researcher for 2 years and completed her undergraduate thesis on this project. She looked at the effects of rearing environment on cardiac development, metabolism and behaviour in an important fish species. Yellow perch are a critical culture, ecological, and economic species for both recreational and https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/228/20/jeb251676/369589/ECR-Spotlight-Mellissa-Easwaramoorthy