Epigenetic Responses to Anthropogenic Versus Natural Sources of Oil Exposure Differ in Wild Arctic Seabird Populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Anthropogenic pollution can have detrimental effects on organismal physiology, behavior, and fitness, but the underlying genomic mechanisms mediating these effects are not well understood. Epigenetic regulation, such as DNA methylation, has been proposed as a potential mechanism mediating these effects, but currently, there are few studies in wild populations. Here, we examined the methylation patterns of liver tissues from black guillemot ( Cepphus grylle ) in regions of the Canadian Arctic with different histories of exposure to polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs)—contaminants associated with hydrocarbons and petrochemicals. As compared to a reference site with minimal PAC exposure, the two sites with exposure to anthropogenic sources of PACs (shipping and spills) shared more differentially methylated regions (DMRs) than they did with the site experiencing chronic exposure to natural PACs (a hydrocarbon seep). Furthermore, we found that guillemots that have been exposed to anthropogenic PACs are characterized by having DMRs with significantly greater ratios of hypermethylated to hypomethylated DNA versus the population experiencing chronic exposure to natural PACs. However, birds from all three sites with elevated PAC exposure shared a core set of DMRs, implying that there are some consistent methylation responses to this family of compounds. Taken together, these results imply that the specific composition and exposure length of PACs can influence the direction of the epigenetic response. The identified DMRs serve as a genomic resource for further research investigating the functional role of DNA methylation in response to anthropogenic oil pollution.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".