Dr. Kei Nomiyama, Assistant Professor Center for Marine Environmental Studies (CMES), has won the “Incentive Award” at the conference of “The Japanese Society of Environmental Toxicology” which was held during 3-4, October 2009 at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. In the conference, Dr. Kei Nomiyama delivered an oral presentation entitled "Risk assessment and accumulation features of hydroxylated PCBs (OH-PCBs) in the blood of Baikal seals", and received the "Incentive Award" along with one other young scientist.

His study focused on monitoring PCBs and other organohalogen metabolites and understanding their accumulation mechanisms in various species of marine (e.g. cetaceans and seals) and terrestrial (e.g. human, dog, cat, and raccoon dog) mammals obtained from the archived sample collection in the Environmental Specimen Bank (es-BANK) of Ehime University. Dr. Nomiyama and Dr. Daisuke Imaeda (Ehime Univ.) studied the residue levels and characteristics of PCBs and OH-PCBs in the blood of Baikal seals collected at Lake Baikal, Russia during 2005. Moreover, they reported that the exposure to several OH-PCB congeners was associated with modification of the thyroid hormone characteristics in Baikal seals, mainly reducing the concentrations of circulating free T3 and total T3. These results suggest that the relationship between OH-PCBs levels and thyroid hormone homeostasis will be useful to develop an understanding of the effect on normal physiological functions in Baikal seals.

This study was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (No. 20221003), Exploratory Research (No. 21651024) and ‘‘Global COE Program” from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).