Microplastic exposure is associated with epigenomic effects in the model organism <i>Pimephales promelas</i> (fathead minnow)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Microplastics have evolutionary and ecological impacts across species, affecting organisms' development, reproduction, and behavior along with contributing to genotoxicity and stress. As plastic pollution is increasing and ubiquitous, gaining a better understanding of organismal responses to microplastics is necessary. Epigenetic processes such as DNA methylation are heritable forms of molecular regulation influenced by environmental conditions. Therefore, determining such epigenetic responses to microplastics will reveal potential chronic consequences of this environmental pollutant. We performed an experiment across two generations of fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) to elucidate the transgenerational epigenetic effects of microplastic exposure. We exposed the first generation of fish to four different treatments of microplastics: two concentrations of each of pre-consumer polyethylene (PE) and PE collected from Lake Ontario. We then raised the first filial generation with no microplastic exposure. We used enzymatic methylation sequencing on adult liver tissue and homogenized larvae to evaluate DNA methylation differences among treatments, sexes, and generations. Our findings show the origin of the plastic had a larger effect in female minnows whereas the effect of concentration was stronger in the males. We also observed transgenerational effects, highlighting a mechanism in which parents can pass on the effects of microplastic exposure to their offspring. Many of the genes found within differentially methylated regions in our analyses are known to interact with estrogenic chemicals associated with plastic and are related to metabolism. This study highlights the persistent and potentially serious impacts of microplastic pollution on gene regulation in freshwater systems.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".