Department of Biology, University of Turku, Finland.
Department of Animal Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), Wageningen The Netherlands.
Epigenetics. 2022 Jun;17(6):625-641. doi: 10.1080/15592294.2021.1943863. Epub 2021 Aug 9.
Anthropogenic pollution is known to negatively influence an organism's physiology, behaviour, and fitness. Epigenetic regulation, such as DNA methylation, has been hypothesized as a potential mechanism to mediate such effects, yet studies in wild species are lacking. We first investigated the effects of early-life exposure to the heavy metal lead (Pb) on DNA methylation levels in a wild population of great tits (), by experimentally exposing nestlings to Pb at environmentally relevant levels. Secondly, we compared nestling DNA methylation from a population exposed to long-term heavy metal pollution (close to a copper smelter), where birds suffer from pollution-related decrease in food quality, and a control population. For both comparisons, the analysis of about one million CpGs covering most of the annotated genes revealed that pollution-related changes in DNA methylation were not genome wide, but enriched for genes underlying developmental processes. However, the results were not consistent when using binomial or beta binomial regression highlighting the difficulty of modelling variance in CpGs. Our study indicates that post-natal anthropogenic heavy metal exposure can affect methylation levels of development related genes in a wild bird population.
人为污染已知会对生物体的生理、行为和适应能力产生负面影响。表观遗传调控，如 DNA 甲基化，被假设为介导这些影响的潜在机制，但在野生物种中缺乏研究。我们首先通过在环境相关水平下用 Pb 实验性地暴露雏鸟，研究了早期生命暴露于重金属铅 (Pb) 对野生成年山雀（Parus major）的 DNA 甲基化水平的影响。其次，我们比较了暴露于长期重金属污染（靠近铜冶炼厂）的种群和对照种群的雏鸟 DNA 甲基化水平。在这两种比较中，对覆盖大多数注释基因的约 100 万个 CpG 的分析表明，与污染相关的 DNA 甲基化变化不是全基因组的，而是富集了发育过程相关的基因。然而，当使用二项式或贝塔二项式回归来模拟 CpG 的方差时，结果并不一致，这突出了模型化 CpG 方差的困难。我们的研究表明，后天人为的重金属暴露会影响野生鸟类种群中与发育相关的基因的甲基化水平。
