Effects of Physiological Concentrations of Heavy Metals Both Individually and in Mixtures on the Viability and Function of Peripheral Blood Human Leukocytes<i>In Vitro</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among environmental contaminants recognized for their toxicity and global distribution, heavy metals are elements known to exert serious ecological consequences. Published experiments on the immunotoxic effects of metals such as methylmercury (MeHg), cadmium (Cd), and lead (Pb) were often conducted at concentrations higher than those present in the environment or those in human blood. In the present study the in vitro effects on human blood of environmentally relevant concentrations of MeHg (33-200 mug/L), Cd (3.1-16 mug/L), and Pb (75-207 mug/L) were assessed individually and in mixtures on the viability and immune competence of peripheral blood leukocytes (PBLs). At MeHg concentrations of 120 and 200 mug/L both lymphocyte proliferation, as measured by [(3)H]thymidine incorporation, and natural killer (NK) cytotoxity activity, as determined by dioctadecyloacarbocyanine, were suppressed. Our results showed an increase of intracellular thiols in lymphocytes and in monocytes at all the concentrations of metals tested. A decrease in the level of metallothionein (MT) was seen in monocytes in presence of Hg at concentration of 120 mug/L and higher. For lymphocytes, a significant increase of MT in groups containing the lower concentrations of Cd, and Hg was noted. In summary, it appears that Hg represents the most toxic metal at environmentally relevant concentrations on human peripheral mononuclear cells. The effects of Hg exposure were greater on lymphocytes and NK cells than on monocytes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".