Multigenerational Effects of Weathered Polyethylene Microplastics on <i>Drosophila melanogaster</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Most plastics are released into the environment once they are discarded, resulting in microplastics (<5 mm) being found in every part of the world. To better understand their toxicity, we exposed four generations of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to high-density polyethylene (HDPE) microplastics (<38 μm) and monitored their reproductive performance. We found that the eclosion fraction of pupae was 5.7% higher ( p < 0.05) in the stream of flies that were fed 100 mg/kg HDPE across all generations when compared to those fed control food. Several fourth-generation treatment flies expressed malformed salivary glands and scutella. No toxicity was observed in the number of pupae and flies that emerged from the eggs laid in each generation or their mean pupation and eclosion time. Moreover, no toxicity was observed in the development of larvae into adult flies (0.1–10 000 mg/kg HDPE) and various sublethal end points (100 mg/kg HDPE) such as larva and adult fly locomotion and the mass of female and male flies. These results, obtained with realistic weathered microplastics, indicate that HDPE microplastics at the concentrations evaluated are unlikely to be lethal in Drosophila melanogaster; however malformations are still possible despite little-to-no observable internalization of the microplastics.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".