Task 3

This task will explore physiological and behavioral responses to toxic Alexandrium sp. exposure and will test the second hypothesis assessing if PST accumulation in oysters is, at least, partially determined by their physiological status and responses. A transcriptomic approach will first of all be developed, to figure out the modified mechanisms in oysters in response to Alexandrium, and on a second hand, to search correlations between gene expression levels and toxin accumulation rate for oysters with different PST accumulation profiles. A second objective of this task is to define some molecular markers able to be used next in task 4 as contamination and/or biotransformation biomarkers.