NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region

Tags: contaminants, aquatic ecosystems, traditional food, beluga whale

Objective(s): To characterize the effects that chemical extracts from the traditional food samples have on a number of cellular processes to indicate the type of toxicity that those chemical extracts may cause; and, to use the Arctic beluga as a "clean" reference in investigations of the biological activity of extracts from the blubber of belugas in the Saint Lawrence Estuary.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No.5471. The objectives of this research project are to: 1. Characterize the effects that chemical extracts from the traditional food samples have on a number of cellular processes. Their results can indicate the type of toxicity that those chemical extracts may cause. 2. Use the Arctic beluga as a "clean" reference in investigations of the biological activity of extracts from the blubber of belugas in the Saint Lawrence Estuary. The research team will extract mixtures of chemicals from the different beluga blubber traditional food samples either with a silicone-disk based passive sampling technique or with a solvent-based extraction techniques. The team will then expose different cell cultures to those extracts and observe the resulting effects. The size of the effects recorded in the laboratory tests can be compared between samples (or with samples from other studies using the same approach) to appraise the relative toxicity. The research team then also perform non-targeted chemical analysis on a few selected extracts to identify the bioactive chemicals responsible for the observed biological activities. The research team plan to meet with members of the Tuktoyaktuk community during the Arctic Science Meeting in Toronto in early December 2022 to discuss the project. The team will participate in the communication activities of two other University of Waterloo researchers who currently have an active project on traditional foods in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. Study participant Yuhao Chen visited Tuktoyaktuk as part of those activities earlier in 2022. Additional community visits are planned early in 2023, where colleagues will be able to share project results with the community. The research team have prepared short summaries of the main findings of the investigations that we would like to share with the Dept. of Health and Social Services (DHSS) of the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) and with the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation (IRC). The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from February 17, 2023 to March 31, 2023.