Environmental specimen banking

Environmental specimen banking has been recognized for decades as an important complement to environmental monitoring and research programs. Well-documented representative specimens that are preserved over long periods of time represent a very valuable resource that can be used for future retrospective investigations and verification of previous studies using such specimens. Traditionally, banked environmental specimens have included human tissues and fluids, animal and plant tissues (usually cryogenically preserved), soils, sediments, ice cores, etc.

Specimen banking programs and national facilities to support such programs exist in several countries and more are either planned or in development stages. The reasons for establishing environmental specimen banks (ESBs) vary. In some cases, ESBs have been established to evaluate the results of governmental environmental policies and regulations (A good example is the German Environmental Specimen Bank). For some ESBs, the establishment of a resource for animal health evaluation is a driving force (e.g., the National Marine Mammal Tissue Bank in the USA and the Mediterranean Marine Mammal Tissue Bank in Italy). For others, the ESB is a research tool used to investigate temporal trends in ecosystems (for example, the Time Capsule for Environment and Endangered Wildlife and the ESB for Global Monitoring (es-BANK), both in Japan; the former also functioning as the ESB for governmental environmental monitoring in Japan). Regardless of the reasons for establishing such ESBs, each bank has certain common characteristics: carefully designed collection and banking procedures to ensure sample integrity, the capacity for maintaining unaltered specimens in storage for long periods of time (in most cases, cryogenic storage systems), and well-designed sample inventory and tracking systems.

In November 2005, the International Environmental Specimen Bank (IESB) Symposium was held in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. This symposium was intended as a forum to exchange ideas and information on environmental specimen banking as applied to environmental research and monitoring, quality assurance, and the health of biota and ecosystems. The IESB Symposium was also the latest in a series of international workshops and conferences on the subject held on an irregular basis since the 1970s. These international gatherings have had a great influence on the development and direction of ESBs over the last three decades.

The first international meeting was the International Workshop on the Use of Biological Specimens for the Assessment of Human Exposure to Environmental Pollutants that was held in Luxembourg in April 1977, with proceedings published in 1979.¹ The objectives of this workshop were to assess the types of environmental pollutants and human specimens most suitable for biological monitoring and to evaluate the probable usefulness of biological specimen banking.

The second workshop was held in October 1978 in Berlin, Germany. The recommendations from this meeting (International Workshop on Monitoring Environmental Materials and Specimen Banking) were to: (1) establish environmental specimen banks that are important in analyzing trends in exposure to previously unrecognized pollutants or pollutants for which analytical techniques may at present be inadequate; (2) establish pilot specimen banks as soon as possible to study problems of organizing long-time storage in banking programs; and (3) harmonize these activities internationally as much as possible.²

The third international gathering was held in May 1982 in Saarbrucken, Germany. The proceedings of this symposium, International Symposium on Environmental Specimen Banking and Monitoring as Related to Banking, were published in book-form in 1984.³ It is apparent when reading the proceedings from this symposium that certain developments were taking place in the ESB community. Firstly, ESBs were in a transitional phase from pilot to application. Secondly, there was the recognition that ESB could be a significant part of environmental monitoring by providing a temporal record of pollution trends, providing a means of retrospective analyses using future improved procedures, providing a means to investigate temporal trends of future unrecognized environmental chemicals of toxicological significance, and providing for the verification of effectiveness of regulations or management practices concerning the manufacturing and use of toxic chemicals.

Additional international specimen banking meetings followed the 1982 symposium in Saarbruken. These included the 11th US-German Seminar of State and Planning on Environmental Specimen Banking held in May 1988 in Beyreuth, Germany, and the Canadian Specimen Banking Seminar and 12th US- German Seminar of State and Planning on Environmental Specimen Banking held in Ottawa, Canada, in September 1989. Proceedings were not published for either of these two meetings.

In the 1990s, three symposia were held in which presentations were formally published as papers. The International Symposium on Biological and Environmental Specimen Banking (BESB-1), was held in September 1991 at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, and papers were published in Science of the Total Environment.⁴ In December 1995, the Environmental Biomonitoring and Specimen Banking Symposium, was conducted as a special session of Pacifichem ’95 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Papers from this special session were published in the American Chemical Society Symposium Series.⁵ As a follow-up to BESB-1, the International Symposium on Biological Environmental Specimen Banking (BESB-2) was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in May 1996, with papers published in Chemosphere.⁶

In 1997 and 2000, two workshops were held in Japan to discuss and evaluate the potential for using Antarctica as a ‘cryogenic system’ for the long-term preservation of biological and environmental specimens.⁷ These two workshops brought together specimen banking experts from Canada, Europe, and the US together with interested scientists in Japan and resulted in a strengthening of collaborations of the international ESB community in Asia. Then in 2004, two events occurred that led directly to the planning for the IESB Symposium in Charleston. In March 2004, the 1st International Symposium on Environmental Behavior and Ecological Impacts of Persistent Toxic Substances, sponsored by the Ehime University 21st Century’s Center of Excellence Program, was held in Matsuyama, Japan.⁸ In a special symposium session on Specimen Bank and Retrospective Trends, the newly established Environmental Specimen Bank for Global Monitoring (es-BANK) at Ehime University was presented. This workshop was immediately followed by the International Workshop on Time Capsule for Environment and Endangered Wildlife, which functioned as the ‘grand opening’ event of the newly established ESB at the National Institute of Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan.

Thus, in March 2004, two new major ESBs in Japan were introduced to the international community. It was at the Matsuyama symposium and Tsukuba workshop that all participants agreed that a broad-based international symposium on environmental specimen banking, similar to the symposia held previously in Vienna and Stockholm, was needed as there appeared to be a renewed interest in specimen banking and possibly new applications for such a resource. The result was the International Environmental Specimen Bank (IESB) Symposium held in November 2005.

This special issue of the Journal of Environmental Monitoring contains selected papers based on presentations given at the IESB Symposium. Five focus articles describe some ESB programs in the USA (The US National Biomonitoring Specimen Bank and the Marine Environmental Specimen Bank; the US National Cancer Institute’s Natural Products Repository), Sweden (Swedish Museum Environmental Specimen Bank), Japan (ESB for Global Monitoring), and South Africa (Biological Resource Bank). However, other ESBs were also presented at the symposium, including the German Environmental Specimen Bank (consisting of the Environmental Specimen Bank for Human Organ Specimens at the University of Muenster and the Environmental Specimen Bank at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME), the Time Capsule for Environment and Endangered Wildlife at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, the Canadian Wildlife Service Specimen Bank, the Paljakka Environmental Specimen Bank of the Finnish Forest Research Institute, and in the USA: the National Marine Cell Line Library Repository at the University of Southern Maine and the CDC and ASTDR Specimen Packaging, Inventory and Repository (CASPIR) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The value of the ESB as a research resource has become evident as more technical papers have been published recently in peer-reviewed journals on recently recognized ‘emerging chemicals of concern’ using banked specimens as a resource. In addition, re-analysis of samples previously reported on for ‘classical’ contaminants, such as PCBs and chlorinated pesticides, with contemporary analytical methods combined with analysis of contemporary samples using these newer methods has enabled researchers to discern more accurate temporal patterns of such contaminants. For this special issue of the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, several technical papers are presented from the IESB Symposium that provide excellent examples of how specimens from the ESBs in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and the US are used in such retrospective research.

It is apparent from discussions and presentations at the 2005 IESB Symposium that future directions of the ESBs will involve banking of additional types of specimens that are useful for animal and plant health research (beyond contaminant concentration measurements), and for research on ecosystem changes. This may require banking new kinds of specimens, or preserving the same kinds of specimens in different ways based on newly recognized research applications. In addition to contaminant determinations, many of the specimen banks are considering the banking of cell lines for immunological studies and serum for marine animal disease research, genetic material for genomics research, and biological materials for investigating potential sources of biotoxins and natural products. The monitoring of anthropogenic contaminants in the environment is still the primary application of ESBs and individual banks for cell lines, serum, genetic materials, and natural products already exist. However, environmental monitoring and research programs are becoming broader and more sophisticated, incorporating biological response investigations at the molecular level and the modeling of changes in ecological structure and function. Such highly integrated investigations will require more sophisticated ESBs that can provide a greater variety of related and integrated specimens required for a variety of analytical work within such programs.

Paul R. Becker

Analytical Chemistry Division

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Hollings Marine Laboratory

Charleston, SC 29412, USA

 

Elaine W. Gunter

Specimen Solutions LLC

3939 LaVista Road

Suite 367

Tucker, GA 30084, USA

 

Christoph Schlüter

Federal Environmental Agency

D-06844 Dessau, Germany

 

Yasuyuki Shibata

National Institute for Environmental Studies

Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan

 

Stephen A. Wise

Analytical Chemistry Division

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Gaithersburg, MD 20899 USA

References

1. The Use of Biological Specimens for the Assessment of Human Exposure to Environmental Pollutants, ed. A. Berlin, A. H. Wolf and Y. Hasegawa, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague–Boston–London, 1979.
2. Monitoring Environmental Materials and Specimen Banking, ed. N.-P. Luepke, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague–Boston–London, 1979.
3. Environmental Specimen Banking and Monitoring as Related to Banking, ed. R. A. Lewis, N. Stein and C. W. Lewis, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Boston, MA, 1984.
4. Biological Environmental Specimen Banking, ed. M. Stoeppler and R. Zeisler, Sci. Total Environ., 1993, 139–140, 1–553.
5. Environmental Biomonitoring: Exposure Assessment and Specimen Banking, ed. K. S. Subramanian and G. V. Iyengar, ACS Symposium Series 654, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 1997.
6. Biological Environmental Specimen Banking, ed. H. Emons, Chemosphere, 1997, 34(9–10), 1867–2250.
7. Proceedings of International Workshop on Ultra-Long-Term Cryogenic Preservation Network of Biological and Environmental Specimens, ed. T. Shibata and T. Etoh, in Osaka, Japan, 1997.
8. Proceedings of 1st International Symposium on Environmental Behavior and Ecological Impacts of Persistent Toxic Substances, ed. S. Tanabe, Matsuyama, Japan, 2004.

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