René S Shahmohamadloo

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Washington State University | WSU · School of Biological Sciences

The development of modern, industrial agriculture and its high input–high output carbon energy model is rendering agricultural landscapes less resilient. The expected continued increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, in conjunction with declining soil health and biodiversity losses, could make food more expensive to produ...

Understanding processes that can produce adaptive phenotypic shifts in response to rapid environmental change is critical to reducing biodiversity loss. The ubiquity of environmentally induced epigenetic marks has led to speculation that epigenetic inheritance could potentially enhance population persistence in response to environmental change. Yet...

Ecological risk assessments (ERAs) are crucial when developing national strategies to manage adverse effects from pesticide exposure to natural populations. Yet, estimating risk with surrogate species in controlled laboratory studies jeopardizes the ERA process because natural populations exhibit intraspecific variation within and across species. H...

Environmental risk assessment (ERA) is critical for protecting life by predicting population responses to contaminants. However, routine toxicity testing often examines only one genotype from surrogate species, potentially leading to inaccurate risk assessments, as natural populations typically consist of genetically diverse individuals. To evaluat...

Facing the global biodiversity crisis, conservation practitioners and decision-makers seek to catalyze wildlife recoveries in their region. Here we examined social-ecological attributes related to threatened species recovery in Canada. First, we used a retrospective approach to compare the trajectories of the original species assessed by Canada’s s...

Ecological risk assessments (ERA) are crucial when developing national strategies to manage adverse effects from pesticide exposure to natural populations. Yet, estimating risk with surrogate species in controlled laboratory studies jeopardizes the ERA process because natural populations exhibit intraspecific variation within and across species. He...

Environmental risk assessment is a critical tool for protecting biodiversity and its effectiveness is predicated on predicting how natural populations respond to environmental stressors. Yet, routine toxicity testing typically examines only one genotype, which may render risk assessments inaccurate at the population scale. To determine the importan...

Consuming fish exposed to cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (HABs) may be a major route of microcystin toxin exposure to humans. However, it remains unknown whether fish can accumulate and retain microcystins temporally in waterbodies with recurring seasonal HABs, particularly before and after a HAB event when fishing is active. We conducted a fi...

Toxic harmful algal blooms (HABs) pose serious threats to human health and instances of wildlife death have been documented across taxa. However, the extent of toxicological impacts on wildlife species is largely unresolved, raising uncertainty about the repercussions of increasingly severe HABs on the biodiversity and functioning of aquatic ecosys...

Freshwater ecosystems with recurring harmful algal blooms can also be polluted with plastics. As such, the two environmental problems may interact. To test if microplastics influence the partitioning of microcystins in freshwater lakes, we examined the sorption of four microcystin congeners to different polymers of commercially available plastics (...

Cyanotoxins including microcystins are increasing globally, escalating health risks to humans and wildlife. Freshwater fish can accumulate and retain microcystins in tissues; however, uptake and depuration studies thus far have not exposed fish to microcystins in its intracellular state (i.e., cell-bound or conserved within cyanobacteria), which is...

Harmful algal blooms dominated by Microcystis aeruginosa are causing ecological and socio-economic disturbances to freshwater ecosystems, in particular the Great Lakes, through the production of microcystin toxins, which can cause disease-related effects in freshwater organisms. This thesis investigated the mechanisms of microcystin toxicity to fre...

Microcystins are toxic heptapeptides produced by cyanobacteria in marine and freshwater environments. In biological samples such as fish, microcystins can be found in the free form or covalently bound to protein phosphatases type I and II. Total microcystins in fish have been quantified in the past using the Lemieux Oxidation approach, where all to...

Microcystins that are cell-bound within Microcystis have demonstrated the ability to cause lethal and reproductive impairment in Daphnia, who constitute an important part of aquatic food chains and are known to feed on viable cyanobacterial cells. Recent advances in environmental toxicogenomics can be used to better understand the mechanistic effec...

Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms dominated by Microcystis frequently produce microcystins, a family of toxins capable of inflicting harm to pelagic and benthic freshwater invertebrates. Research on the effect of microcystins on invertebrates is inconclusive; from one perspective, studies suggest invertebrates can coexist in toxic blooms; however...

Microcystis aeruginosa is a cosmopolitan cyanobacteria that continues to jeopardize freshwater ecosystem services by releasing the hepatotoxin microcystin, which can, in some cases, cause death to aquatic fauna and even humans. Currently, our abilities to understand the mechanisms of microcystin toxicology are limited by the lack of a method for pr...

Microcystin-LR is a toxin commonly produced by the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa. It is present in harmful algal blooms and is a concern for both human and environmental health in Canadian freshwater systems. Previous studies have investigated the toxicity of microcystin-LR to other organisms such as fish, however it is important to assess...

Triclosan (TCS) is an antimicrobial ingredient found in personal care products that include soaps, shampoos, and other sanitation goods. TCS is moderately hydrophobic and has been shown to be resistant to wastewater treatment and thus accumulates in biosolids. Biosolids are commonly applied to agricultural land but little is known about the risk th...

A growing body of evidence suggests that amending soil with biosolids can be an integral component of sustainable agriculture. Despite strong evidence supporting its beneficial use in agriculture, there are concerns that chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), could present a risk to terrestrial ecosystems and human h...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) form a symbiotic relationship with the majority of crop plants. AMF provide plants with nutrients (e.g., P), modulate the effect of metal and pathogen exposure, and increase tolerance to moisture stress. The benefits of AMF to plant growth make them important to the development of sustainable agriculture. The land...