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Differentiating metabolomic responses of amphibians to multiple stressors
Citation:
Henderson, Matt, M. Snyder, D. Glinski, AND Tom Purucker. Differentiating metabolomic responses of amphibians to multiple stressors. SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT. Elsevier BV, AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, 838(3):155666, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.155666
Impact/Purpose:
This study demonstrated the utility of metabolomic profiling to classify multiple stressor effects on biochemical pathways. This research applied high throughput metabolomic technology to improve ecological assessments by jointly evaluating the underlying mechanisms of action for pesticide exposure and a natural stressor predation. These understandings will potentially change existing risk assessment procedures by providing a technical tool that enables us to more fully describe the conditional responses to chemicals under different natural settings. While more research is necessary to be able to predict the magnitude of the adverse effects in amphibians from the metabolomic pathways impacted in the current study, successful completion of these and similar scientific approaches will help translate short-term toxicity assay results to long-term population effects on non-target organisms especially when coupled with other ‘omic technologies.
Description:
One of the biggest challenges in ecological risk assessment is determining the impact of multiple stressors on individual organisms and populations in real world scenarios. Frequently, data derived from laboratory studies of single stressors are used to estimate risk parameters and do not adequately address scenarios where other stressors exist. Emerging ‘omic technologies, notably metabolomics, provide an opportunity to address the uncertainties surrounding ecological risk assessment of multiple stressors. The objective of this study was to use metabolomic profiling to investigate the effect of multiple stressors on amphibian metamorphs. We exposed post-metamorphosis (180 days) southern leopard frogs (Lithobates sphenocephala) to the insecticide carbaryl (480 μg/L), predation stress, and a combined pesticide and predation stress treatment. Corticosterone analysis revealed mild support for an induction in response to predation stress alone but strongly suggests that carbaryl exposure, alone or in combination with predation cues, can significantly elevate this known biomarker in amphibians. Metabolomics analysis accurately classed, based on relative nearness, carbaryl and predation induced changes in the hepatic metabolome and biochemical fluxes appear to be associated with a similar biological response. Support vector machine analysis with recursive feature elimination of the acquired metabolomic spectra demonstrated 85–96% classification accuracy among control and all treatment groups when using the top 75 ranked retention time bins. Biochemical fluxes observed in the groups exposed to carbaryl, predation, and the combined treatment include amino acids, sugar derivatives, and purine nucleotides. Ultimately, this methodology could be used to interpret short-term toxicity assays and the presence of environmental stressors to overall metabolomic effects in non-target organisms.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Differentiating metabolomic responses of amphibians to multiple stressors
PubMed Central Link to Manuscript