Abstract
Water pollution poses an important problem, but limited information is available about the joined effects of xenobiotics of different chemical groups to evaluate the real biological response. Procambarus clarkii (P. clarkii) has been demonstrated to be a good bioindicator for assessing the quality of aquatic ecosystems. In this work, we studied the bioaccumulation of cadmium (Cd), arsenic (As) and diclofenac (DCF) in different tissues of P. clarkii during 21 days after the exposure to a “chemical cocktail” of As, Cd and DCF, and until 28 days considering a depuration period. In addition, a combined untargeted and targeted metabolomic analysis was carried out to delve the metabolic impairments caused as well as the metabolization of DCF. Our results indicate that As and Cd were mainly accumulated in the hepatopancreas followed by gills and finally abdominal muscle. As and Cd show a general trend to increase the concentration throughout the exposure experience, while a decrease in the concentration of these elements is observed after 7 days of the depuration process. This is also the case in the abdominal muscle for Cd, but not for As and DCF, which increased the concentration in this tissue in the depuration phase. The hepatopancreas showed the greatest number of metabolic pathways affected. Thus, we observed a crucial bioaccumulation of xenobiotics and impairments of metabolites in different tissues. This is the first study combining the exposure to metals and pharmaceutically active compounds in P. clarkii by untargeted metabolomics including the biotransformation of DCF.
Highlights
The problem of environmental pollution due to the occurrence of pharmaceutically active compounds (PACs), organic pollutants or heavy metals in aquatic ecosystems has led to a growing interest about the study and use of biomarkers (Fernandez-Cisnal et al, 2017, 2018; Gar cía-Sevillano et al, 2015; Hodson, 2002; Zhang et al, 2019, 2021)
We describe a nontargeted metabolomic methodology, based on the combination of two complementary analytical techniques, to investigate the metabolic damages caused by a chemical cocktail of As, Cd and DCF in the crayfish P. clarkii
The combination of target and untargeted metabolomics allowed the decipherment of a large number of altered compounds of P. clarkii in response to a chemical cocktail
Summary
The problem of environmental pollution due to the occurrence of pharmaceutically active compounds (PACs), organic pollutants or heavy metals in aquatic ecosystems has led to a growing interest about the study and use of biomarkers (Fernandez-Cisnal et al, 2017, 2018; Gar cía-Sevillano et al, 2015; Hodson, 2002; Zhang et al, 2019, 2021). P. clarkii is considered an effective bioindicator of environmental pollution (Suarez-Serrano et al, 2010) and has been used for a wide number of studies related with the bioaccumulation of heavy metals (Fernandez-Cisnal et al, 2017), Cd and Zn (Bini et al, 2015) and As or As species (Devesa et al, 2002; Gedik et al, 2017). Environmental metabolomics allows obtaining a global view of the metabolic fingerprint of biological systems exposed to contami nants, providing information at the same time about the interactions of contaminants with living organisms (García-Sevillano et al, 2015). Mass spectrometry techniques are widely used in metabolomics, usually coupled to gas chromatography (GC-MS), which is a robust tool that provides high sensitivity and good resolution for LMM metabolites (Pasikanti et al, 2008) or liquid chromatography (LC), for the simul taneous determination of metabolites with very diverse chemical nature, extending from metabolites detectable by GC-MS to non-volatile com pounds, through the use of complementary retention mechanisms and ionization techniques (Kuehnbaum and Britz-Mckibbin, 2013)
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