Alrezaki Abdulkarem, Aldawood Nouf, Mansour Lamjed, Ahmed Mukhtar, Sirotkin Alexander V, Alwasel Saleh, Harrath Abdel Halim
Department of Zoology, College of Science, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia.
Department of Zoology and Anthropology, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, 949 74 Nitra, Slovakia.
Biology (Basel). 2021 Nov 9;10(11):1153. doi: 10.3390/biology10111153.
Toluene has been shown to be highly toxic to humans and animals and can cause damage to various tissues. However, studies reporting its effects on ovarian function are still limited. In this study, we investigated the in vivo effect of toluene using female Wistar rats. We found that toluene exposure decreased ovarian weight and affected ovarian structure by increasing the number of abnormally growing follicles. Moreover, it significantly increased progesterone and testosterone levels. We also showed that toluene exposure decreased GDF-9 protein and its encoding gene. In addition, it inhibited the expression of most of the genes involved in granulosa cell proliferation and differentiation, such as , and . The TUNEL assay showed that apoptosis occurred at the middle and high doses only (4000 and 8000 ppm, respectively), whereas no effect was observed at the low dose (2000 ppm). Interestingly, we showed that toluene exposure induced autophagy as LC3 protein and its encoding gene significantly increased for all doses of treatment. These results may suggest that the activation of autophagy at a low dose of exposure was to protect ovarian cells against death by inhibiting apoptosis, whereas its activation at high doses of exposure triggered apoptosis leading to cell death.
甲苯已被证明对人类和动物具有高毒性，可对各种组织造成损害。然而，关于其对卵巢功能影响的研究仍然有限。在本研究中，我们使用雌性Wistar大鼠研究了甲苯的体内效应。我们发现，接触甲苯会降低卵巢重量，并通过增加异常生长卵泡的数量来影响卵巢结构。此外，它还显著提高了孕酮和睾酮水平。我们还表明，接触甲苯会降低生长分化因子9（GDF-9）蛋白及其编码基因的水平。此外，它抑制了大多数参与颗粒细胞增殖和分化的基因的表达，如 、 和 。TUNEL检测表明，仅在中高剂量（分别为4000和8000 ppm）时发生凋亡，而在低剂量（2000 ppm）时未观察到影响。有趣的是，我们表明，接触甲苯会诱导自噬，因为所有处理剂量下LC3蛋白及其编码基因均显著增加。这些结果可能表明，低剂量接触时自噬的激活是通过抑制凋亡来保护卵巢细胞免于死亡，而高剂量接触时自噬的激活则引发凋亡导致细胞死亡。
