Researchers from the WilsonToxLab and McArthur lab were amongst those presenting at the WISE conference on IWD in 2026! It’s so good to see new researchers taking each opportunity to share their research and talk about their science. Seen above, left to right, are Clarice (UG thesis student in WilsonToxLab), Amy (McArthur lab), Tina (McArthur lab), Molly (MSc in WilsonToxLab), Maddie (UG thesis student in WilsonToxLab) and Ally (UG thesis student in WilsonToxLab). Presentations were on the effects of chemical exposure in zebrafish or with a rainbow trout cell line. Clarice is studying the effects of chemical exposure in wild type and CYP3A65 knock out zebrafish; Ally has a similar project but with CYP1B1 knockout fish. Both projects are linking chemical metabolism to developmental toxicity outcomes. Maddie’s project is focused on developing reference toxicants for the RTgill-W1 assay to study whole effluent toxicity. Molly’s MSc is using 4 species of fish to examine the toxicity of PFAS precursors; chemicals that can be converted into PFAS in the environment by abiotic and biotic transformation. Her research will produce data to assess the environmental risk of PFAS precursors and assess the Fish Embryo Toxicity test for chemical toxicity, using a variety of model and native species.

Mellissa defended her MSc on Baits enriched transcriptomics to study the zebrafish defensome on February 24th! Her project has been an idea for a long time, but required the right person to bring it to fruition! Baits enriched transcriptomics allows us to specifically target and sequence the 500-600 genes involved in chemical defence, allowing Mellissa to examine the sex- and tissue- specific expression of genes in liver, gill, intestine and kidney. Her project gives us an exciting dataset to explore differences in gene expression for tissues that are critical for toxicokinetics. For example, the gill is in direct contact with the external environment and an important organ for uptake of water soluble chemicals while the intestine will be the site of uptake for more lipophilic chemicals coming through the diet. The liver is the most important organ for chemical metabolism and the kidney and intestine both contribute to chemical excretion, through the urine and feces. Mellissa received lots of high praise at her defence, for a great written thesis, clear presentation and awesome defence. One committee member said she has some of the cleanest sequencing data they have ever seen! High praise. Her lab mates made her a themed cake to celebrate – a strepavadin magnetic bead holding on to the baits transcripts. Congratulations Mellissa!

Mellissa is now working in the lab, focused on publishing manuscripts from her MSc and completing a project on molecular docking with CYP1A. The molecular docking work was started in her MSc, with a Michael Smith foreign study supplement to her NSERC CGS-M, in collaboration with Dr. Jared Goldstone at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. I’m so glad we have some time to see that work completed.

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!