Tanguay Lab Information

The Tanguay laboratory focuses on using zebrafish (Danio rerio) as systems toxicology model. There are many dimensions to our research program focused on exploiting the unique advantages of zebrafish to protect and improve human and environmental health. We know that some chemicals in our environment interact with our expressed genomes to produce disease and dysfunctions. We aim to discover these chemicals and their biological targets. Our central hypothesis is that chemical and nanomaterial bioactivity are governed by their inherent structures, and these structures permit interactions with biological targets and systems to alter biological activity. We use chemical and nanomaterial structural information, coupled with the biological responses they produce in zebrafish, as anchors for mechanistic and structure response relationship research. Over the past several years we have developed automated high throughput instrumentation to accelerate phenotype discovery and have evaluated the bioactivity of thousands of chemicals and mixtures including, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), ethanol, flame retardants, nicotine, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and complex environmental mixtures. We employ numerous system biology, imaging, molecular biology, genetics, transcriptomics, small non-coding RNAs analysis, metabolomics, and bioinformatics to define toxicity mechanisms. Finally, we are working in the area of tissue regeneration to discover the molecular pathways that prevent or promote vertebrate tissue regeneration with the goal to translate zebrafish discoveries to the clinic.