Abstract
Mixture toxicity is an important issue for the risk assessment of environmental pollutants, for which an extensive amount of data are necessary in evaluating their potential adverse health effects. However, it is very hard to decipher the interaction between compounds due to limited techniques. Contamination of heavy metals and organophosphoric insecticides under the environmental and biological settings poses substantial health risk to humans. Although previous studies demonstrated the co-occurrence of cadmium (Cd) and chlorpyrifos (CPF) in environmental medium and food chains, their interaction and potentially synergistic toxicity remain elusive thus far. Here we integrated the approaches of thin-layer chromatography and 1H NMR to study the interaction between Cd2+ and CPF in inducing hepatoxicity. A novel interaction was identified between Cd2+ and CPF, which might be the bonding between Cd2+ and nitrogen atom in the pyridine ring of CPF, or the chelation formation between one Cd2+ and two CPF molecules. The Cd-CPF complex was conferred with distinct biological fate and toxicological performances from its parental components. We further demonstrated that the joint hepatoxicity of Cd ion and CPF was chiefly due to the Cd-CPF complex-facilitated intracellular transport associated with oxidative stress.
Highlights
The co-existence of various pollutants in environment and food chains is considerably concerned due to the fused impact on environment and public health [1,2], especially if the joint toxicity of pollutants poses adverse health effects on humans [2]
Despite the cooccurrence of these two chemicals in environmental medium and food chains, their toxicity and human risk assessment were predominantly based on the toxicological performances of single chemical
We demonstrated the formation of the Cd-CPF complex, which was conferred with distinct biological fate and toxicological performances from its parental chemicals
Summary
The co-existence of various pollutants in environment and food chains is considerably concerned due to the fused impact on environment and public health [1,2], especially if the joint toxicity of pollutants poses adverse health effects on humans [2]. After 24 h, no toxicity was observed to Hep G2 cells treated with up to 32 mM Cd2+ and up to 1,280 mM CPF, respectively (Fig. 1a&b). To intensively study the synergistic effect, we chose the concentration of 10 mM for both Cd2+ and CPF, at which neither of them caused damage to cell viability (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2a).
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