Analysis of lactate and malate dehydrogenase enzyme profiles of selected major carps of wetland of Calcutta.

ABSTRACT

The East Calcutta Wetland (ECW), a Ramsar site in India, acts as the only sink for both city sewages as well as effluents from the surrounding small- scale industries and is alarmingly polluted with heavy metals. The three best edible major carp species rohu (Labeo rohita,), catla (Catla catla,) and mrigala (Cirrhinus mrigala) were undertaken to monitor lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and malate dehydrogenase (MDH) by cellulose acetate electrophoresis (CAE) to assess the effects of pollutants, if any. Crude tissue extracts were prepared from brain, eye, heart, skeletal muscle and kidney tissue respectively from each type of fish. No differences were not found in MDH of catla from both sites for all tissues analyzed in this study. Rohu also showed similar mobility for all tissues except for heart tissue which was distinctly different in fishes from ECW site than that of its counterpart from non ECW site. On the other hand, MDH of two tissues of mrigala, eye and muscle respectively showed different migration patterns. LDH profiles for all tissues of three fish species from both the sites were consistently similar, only the expression levels of muscle LDH of mrigala and kidney LDH of rohu varied little.