The Immune Toxicities And Mechanisms Of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals In Early Life Stages Of Zebrafish

Studies of the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals(EDCs)have become one of the frontier and hot issue of environmental science.It has now firmly estrablished that EDCs can not only impair the endocrine system of exposed fish,but also disrupt their immune competence.The estrogen receptor agonist,17?-ethynyl estradiol(EE2),and 3?-HSD inhibitor,trilostane(TRI),are the EDCs with specific target in the endocrine system,and are present extensively in the aquatic environment.In this study,these two chemicals were chosen as the representative EDCs,and the immune toxicities of EE2 and TRI in the early life stages of zebrafish were studied.Moreover,lipopolysaccharides(LPS)were employed as the immunelogic stimulant to investigate the different immunotoxic effects of EDCs between the resting and activated immunesystem.The results showed that both EE2 and TRI strongly disrupted the endocrine system of zebrafish.The vitellogenin genes,namely vtg1 and vtg2,were induced by high EE2 concentration,while decreased by TRI.There were different disrupting effects of EDCs on immune and endocrine system between activated and inactive immune state.It was also found that the effects of EE2 and TRI were different in the different life stage of zebrafish.Addtionally,low concentration of EE2 induced while high concentration inhibited the immune system.For TRI,the immune system was inhibited.In summary,our data demonstated that EDCs exposure caused immune toxicities on fish,and provided useful information for the ecological risk assessment of EDCs.