Considerable interest and controversy has arisen over the potential effects of seismic surveys carried out during exploration for oil and gas deposits. Regarding fish, there is a concern that intense sound sources, such as seismic airguns, may injure their auditory system. Salmonid cDNA microarrays, reciprocal suppression subtractive hybridization libraries and quantitative reverse transcription - polymerase chain reaction were used to identify and study a responsive gene set in the inner ear of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) following seismic airgun exposure. Taken together results point to seismic noise exposure altering salmon ear transcripts that likely play important roles in a variety of processes, including sensory perception of sound. Also, initial results demonstrate that genomics has the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of the impact of seismic airguns on gene and molecular pathways involved in hearing, and provide valuable molecular biomarkers that can act as an early warning sensor to acoustic stress. -- Keywords: seismic; fish; ear; microarray; expressed sequence tags; genomic
