Environmental and anthropogenic stressors can disrupt homeostasis and negatively affect aquatic organisms, potentially leading to impacts on growth, reproduction and survival over time. The focus of the research in the Jeffries Lab is to investigate how various environmental and contaminant stressors can affect an individual’s fitness through examination of responses at cellular, tissue and whole organism levels of biological organization, and how these responses can potentially scale up to population level consequences. We use genomics techniques to characterize the cellular responses of fishes to abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic stressors relevant to aquatic ecosystems. The cellular level responses are integrated with tissue or whole organism level performance indices to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of exposure to environmental stressors and to address whether populations and species can persist in changing or disturbed aquatic environments. This work has focused on non-model fishes that are economically important, invasive or of conservation concern and combines approaches used in the fields of physiology, ecological genomics, fish ecology and ecotoxicology. We also examine how exposure to environmental stressors affects the expression of immune response genes and increases the susceptibility of stressed individuals to pathogen infections, a potentially significant and undetected cause of fish mortality in disturbed ecosystems. Because of the widespread influence of climate change, environmental disturbances and the impacts of human activity on ecosystems, much of this research is applicable for studying aquatic systems throughout North America
