Yu Ziyue, Yan Changzhou, Qiu Donghua, Zhang Xin, Wen Ce, Dong Sijun
Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, 361021, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, 361021, China.
Environ Pollut. 2023 Feb 15;319:120977. doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2022.120977. Epub 2022 Dec 28.
Microplastics have been widely reported as carriers of antibiotics, yet studies investigating the combined ecotoxicology of microplastics and antibiotics on organisms is limited. In this study, different sized polystyrene plastics and oxytetracycline (OTC) were used to carry out a 30-day single and binary-combined exposure experiment of zebrafish, and the microplastics and OTC accumulation, liver histological alteration, biomarkers and transcriptomic response of zebrafish were evaluated. Our results indicated that 300 nm and 50 nm plastic particles increased the OTC accumulation in liver by 33.8% and 44.5%, respectively. Microplastics and OTC induced severe liver histological damage, and the damage is size-dependent, increasing with the decrease of microplastics sizes. The liver biomarkers indicated a different response pattern in single microplastics exposure and combined with OTC, single or co-exposure of 50 nm nano-plastics and OTC induced intense responses of integrated biomarker response values. The 50 nm nano-plastics, OTC and their combined exposure induced 1330, 2693 and 3965 significantly differentially expressed genes, respectively, in which the steroid biosynthesis pathway was significantly affected by all the three treatments. This study elucidated the size-dependent effects of microplastics and provided detailed data from histopathology to transcriptome profile, enhancing our understanding of the ecotoxicity of microplastics and OTC.
微塑料作为抗生素载体已被广泛报道，但关于微塑料和抗生素对生物体联合生态毒理学的研究有限。在本研究中，使用不同尺寸的聚苯乙烯塑料和土霉素（OTC）对斑马鱼进行了为期30天的单一和二元组合暴露实验，并评估了斑马鱼体内微塑料和OTC的积累、肝脏组织学改变、生物标志物及转录组反应。我们的结果表明，300nm和50nm的塑料颗粒分别使肝脏中OTC的积累增加了33.8%和44.5%。微塑料和OTC诱导了严重的肝脏组织学损伤，且这种损伤具有尺寸依赖性，随着微塑料尺寸的减小而增加。肝脏生物标志物在单一微塑料暴露以及与OTC联合暴露时表现出不同的反应模式，50nm纳米塑料与OTC单一或共同暴露诱导了综合生物标志物反应值的强烈反应。50nm纳米塑料、OTC及其联合暴露分别诱导了1330、2693和3965个显著差异表达基因，其中类固醇生物合成途径受到所有三种处理的显著影响。本研究阐明了微塑料的尺寸依赖性效应，并提供了从组织病理学到转录组概况的详细数据，增强了我们对微塑料和OTC生态毒性的理解。
