Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, DLNP, Dubna, Russia.
Institute for Nuclear Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
PLoS One. 2021 Aug 5;16(8):e0255066. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255066. eCollection 2021.
Natural background radiation is a permanent multicomponent factor. It has an influence on biological organisms, but effects of its deprivation still remain unclear. The aim of our work was to study for the first time responses of D. melanogaster to conditions of the Deep Underground Low-Background Laboratory DULB-4900 (BNO, INR, RAS, Russia) at the transcriptome level by RNA-seq profiling. Overall 77 transcripts demonstrated differential abundance between flies exposed to low and natural background radiation. Enriched biological process functional categories were established for all genes with differential expression. The results showed down-regulation of primary metabolic processes and up-regulation of both the immune system process and the response to stimuli. The comparative analysis of our data and publicly available transcriptome data on D. melanogaster exposed to low and high doses of ionizing radiation did not reveal common DEGs in them. We hypothesize that the observed changes in gene expression can be explained by the influence of the underground conditions in DULB-4900, in particular, by the lack of stimuli. Thus, our study challenges the validity of the LNT model for the region of background radiation doses below a certain level (~16.4 nGy h-1) and the presence of a dose threshold for D. melanogaster.
天然本底辐射是一种永久性的多组分因素。它对生物有机体会产生影响，但关于其缺乏的影响仍不清楚。我们的工作旨在首次通过 RNA-seq 分析研究 D. melanogaster 在俄罗斯 BNO、INR、RAS 的深地下低本底实验室（DULB-4900）条件下对低本底和天然本底辐射的转录组水平的反应。总共 77 个转录本显示出暴露于低本底和天然本底辐射的果蝇之间的丰度差异。对所有差异表达基因进行了富集的生物过程功能分类。结果表明，主要代谢过程下调，免疫系统过程和对刺激的反应上调。我们对 D. melanogaster 暴露于低剂量和高剂量电离辐射的公开转录组数据进行了比较分析，没有发现它们之间共同的差异表达基因。我们假设观察到的基因表达变化可以用 DULB-4900 中地下条件的影响来解释，特别是缺乏刺激。因此，我们的研究对低于某个水平（~16.4 nGy h-1）的背景辐射剂量区域的 LNT 模型的有效性以及 D. melanogaster 的剂量阈值的存在提出了挑战。
