Abstract
Recently, concern has been raised over the transport, transformation, and fate of carbon nanodots (CNDs) after their release into the environment. Their toxicity towards organisms and humans has recently been addressed as an important issue. In this study, a metabolomic approach was employed to obtain an insight into the effect of CNDs (either pristine or doped with nitrogen and nitrogen/sulfur) on zebrafish. Embryos were exposed to concentrations corresponding to lethal concentration (LC) LC50 (550, 400, and 150 μg mL−1), LC50/2 (275, 200, and 75 μg mL−1), and LC50/4 (138, 100, and 38 μg mL−1) of the three CNDs (non-doped, N-doped, and N,S-codoped, respectively) to scrutinize the interactions of the CNDs with the larvae. Numerous differences in the metabolic pathways were recorded in all cases. Seven metabolic pathways were detected in the control larvae. When the larvae were exposed to concentrations equal to LC50, LC50/2, and LC50/4 of non-doped CNDs, 12, 12, and 3 metabolic pathways were detected, respectively. In the case of N-doped CNDs, 4, 7, and 4 pathways were detected, while in the case of N,S-codoped CNDs, 8, 5, and 5 pathways were detected when exposed to concentrations of LC50, LC50/2, and LC50/4, respectively. In all cases, certain metabolic pathways were altered while others were either down-regulated or up-regulated. Some of these changes include the activation of alanine, aspartate, and glutamate metabolism, aminoacyl-tRNA biosynthesis, butanoate metabolism, D-glutamine, and D-glutamate metabolism, glutathione metabolism, selenoamino acid metabolism, valine, leucine, and isoleucine degradation pathways. Moreover, the deactivation of starch and sucrose metabolism, the glycine, serine, and threonine metabolism, among others, were recorded. Our findings underline the importance to further study the impact of CNDs on marine organisms. As zebrafish has been shown to share many similarities with humans in bioprocesses and genome, it can be assumed that CNDs may also pose a threat to human health.
Highlights
This study aims to obtain a better insight into the metabolic alterations that occur in zebrafish upon their exposure to carbon nanodots (CNDs) and may be responsible for the phenotypic alterations
This study examined the effect of CNDs on the metabolism of zebrafish
CNDs, i.e., non-doped CNDs, nitrogen-doped, and nitrogen/sulfur codoped analogs were studied at three concentrations to obtain insights into the metabolic alterations
Summary
The research interest involving nanomaterials continues to grow unabated as more and more researchers have been involved in this research field, aiming to exploit the expanding range of properties of nanomaterials [1]. The advancement in the development of innovative nanomaterials has led to the synthesis of carbon nanodots (CNDs). The research interest around CNDs gave birth to a huge number of studies and established a new, flourishing field of research. Since the discovery of CNDs over a decade ago, research on their synthesis and application has grown exponentially, and enormous interest has been aroused in introducing them into health-, environmental-, and Nanomaterials 2021, 11, 483.
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