Abstract
Industrial activity generates harmful substances which can travel via aerial or water currents thousands of kilometers away from the place they were used impacting the local biota where they deposit. The presence of harmful anthropogenic substances in the Antarctic is particularly surprising and striking due to its remoteness and the apparent geophysical isolation developed with the flows of the Antarctic Circumpolar current and the ring of westerly winds surrounding the continent. However, long-range atmospheric transport (LRAT) of pollutants has been detected in the Antarctic since the 70’s along the Antarctic trophic food web from phytoplankton to birds. Still, no information exists on the presence of cytotoxic compounds in marine sediments neither at basin scales (thousands of kilometers) nor in water depths (hundreds of meters) beyond shallow coastal areas near research stations. Our results showed for the first time that there is cytotoxic activity in marine sediment extracts from water depths >1000 m and along thousands of kilometers of Antarctic continental shelf, in some cases comparable to that observed in Mediterranean areas. Ongoing anthropogenic pressure appears as a serious threat to the sessile benthic communities, which have evolved in near isolation for millions of years in these environments.
Highlights
The presence of harmful anthropogenic substances such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) on our planet is ubiquitous[1,2,3]
The dose-response curves of EROD activity assays revealed that sediments from sampling stations in the northern Weddell Sea (NW) and the Bransfield Strait (BS) had the highest ability to induce EROD activity, in contrast some stations from the SW did not induce EROD activity at all (Fig. 2, Table 1)
In marine sediment extracts from areas known to suffer from high anthropogenic impact, such as the Po and Danube river mouths, the presence of CYP1A inducers yielded to comparable CYP1A responses to those observed in samples from NW and BS (Fig. 2, Table 1)
Summary
The presence of harmful anthropogenic substances such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) on our planet is ubiquitous[1,2,3]. This cell line express the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) and the isoenzyme CYP1A after exposure to persistent harmful substances such as PAHs, PCBs, dioxins and pharmaceuticals as well as extracts of environmental matrices such as sediment[16,19].
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