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Water scarcity, quality, and control are growing problems worldwide. In this paper, values associated with water—sociocultural, economic, and chemical—in a small-scale gold mining community in northeastern Ghana are considered. Mining activities have affected the quality of locally scarce water resources. In an area without government provision of water, this situation has also forced community members to develop innovative water strategies that reflect the ways that water is understood and valued with regard to personal health and the environment as well as to the seasonality of water acquisition. These community evaluations of water in the gold mining community are then compared with the chemical analysis of water samples collected near the gold mining site. The ways in which these evaluations of water quality—based on particular knowledge systems—coincide and differ suggest the need for community participation in environmental and health assessment as well as government oversight and water provision. An examination of the connections between gold mining, water, and health; work and gender; and cultural and chemical assessments of water quality situates this particular water world within larger global concerns about small-scale gold mining, the roles of mining communities and government, and water sustainability.

SummaryWe present an overview of studies of anthropogenic pollutants in East Greenland polar bears over the period of 1999-2011. East Greenland polar bears are among the most polluted species, not just in the Arctic but globally, and represent an excellent biomonitoring species for levels and effects of global pollution in an apex predator. Therefore, an international multidisciplinary team joined to monitor and assess the patterns and concentrations of contaminants and their potential negative impact on polar bears. The review showed that East Greenland polar bears are exposed to a mix of chlorinated, brominated and fluorinated organic compounds as well as mercury which are all known to have endocrine, immune and organ-system toxic properties. For example, the concentrations of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in blubber ranged approximately 800-21,000 ng/g lw while mercury concentrations in liver and kidney ranged 0.1-50 μg/g ww. Regarding health endpoints, bone density seemed to decrease as a function of time and OHC (organohalogen compound) concentrations and further T-score for adult males indicated risk for osteoporosis. .The size of sexual organs decreased with increasing OHC concentrations. In the lower brain stem, mercury-associated decreases in NMDA-receptor levels and DNA-methylation was found The present review indicated that age was one of the major drivers for liver and renal lesions, although contaminants and infectious diseases may also play a role. Lesions in thyroid glands were most likely a result of infectious and genetic factors and probably, together with endocrine disrupting chemical (EDCs), the reason for disturbances/fluctuations in blood plasma thyroid hormone concentrations. Except for bone density reductions and neurological measures, all findings were supported by case-control studies of Greenland sledge dogs exposed long-term orally to similar combinations of contaminant concentrations. The studies of sledge dogs also indicated that the mixture of contaminants and fatty acids in the blubber of prey similar to that of polar bears induces cellular as well as humoral immune toxic changes. These controlled studies using model species for polar bears indicate that the correlative findings between health endpoint and contaminants in polar bears could be a cause-and-effect relationship. Physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modelling showed that the risk quotients were ≥1 for ΣPCB, dieldrin and PFOS, which indicate an increased risk of prenatally reproductive pathology. In conclusion polar bears are susceptible to long-range transported chemicals that may have various adverse effects on multiple organ systems such as the reproductive and immune system.

The increasing application of RNA-seq to study non-model organisms demands easy-to-use and efficient bioinformatics tools to help researchers quickly uncover biological and functional insights from large datasets. Here, we present a unified software suite for processing, analyzing, and interpreting RNA-seq data from any eukaryotic species. This suite consists of a) EcoOmicsDB (www.ecoomicsdb.ca), a database for ortholog mapping and cross-species comparison; b) EcoOmicsAnalyst (www.ecoomicsanalyst.ca), a platform for raw data processing and annotation; and c) ExpressAnalyst (www.expressanalyst.ca), a platform for statistical and functional analysis. The utilities of this suite are demonstrated through case studies of RNA-seq data from multiple non-model species with or without reference transcriptomes. By coupling ultra-fast read mapping algorithms with high-resolution ortholog databases through a user-friendly web interface, the tool suite enables researchers to obtain global expression profiles and gene-level insights from raw RNA-seq reads within 24 hours.

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