Quantitative Determination of Biochemical Constituents and Histomorphology of gonad in Indoplanorbis exustus from Godavari River

Book excerpt: Increasing urbanization, industrialization and green revolution leads to the continued addition of pollutants to the aquatic environment. Aquatic organisms serve as a biological indicator to monitor the aquatic pollution. Pollution may induce certain biochemical changes in aquatic organisms and before the drastic cellular and systematic dysfunctions manifest themselves, appropriate biochemical parameters related to proteins, lipids and glycogen etc. could be used effectively to known the gravity of the situation and to check it at the initial stage itself (Aldridge, 1983). Studies on energy metabolism are concerned in the way in which the major carbohydrate, lipid and proteins fuels are used by a organism for energy production. In invertebrates, changes in the biochemical constituents are pronounced which are cyclic in reproduction, since a great amount of energy, must be channelized to the gonad during reproduction. This is reflected in deposition or depletion of the nutrients with advent or departure of the reproductive period (Lambert and Dehnel, 1974). If molluscs are classified according to the types of accumulated nutrients, then Amphineura’s are lipid oriented (Giese,1966), lamellibranchs may be considered to be polysaccharide oriented (Martin,1961 and Martin and Gaddards,1966), some gastropods appear to possess a polysaccharide-oriented metabolism, while others have lipid-oriented metabolism system and cephalopods apparently do not preferentially accumulate nutrients (Chaige, 1933 and Giese, 1959).