Accumulation, tissue distribution, and biochemical effects of polystyrene microplastics in the freshwater fish red tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus).

By Jian-nan Ding, Shanshan Zhang, Roger Mamitiana Razanajatovo, Hua Zou, Wenbin Zhu. Environmental Pollution, 2018

621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the presence of microplastics (MPs) in marine environments has been detected worldwide, the importance of MPs pollution in freshwater environments has also been emphasized in recent years. However, the body of knowledge regarding the biological effects of MPs on freshwater organisms is still much more limited than on marine organisms. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the accumulation and tissue distribution of MPs in the freshwater fish red tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), as well as the biochemical effects of MPs on O. niloticus. During 14 days of exposure to 0.1 μm polystyrene-MPs at concentrations of 1, 10, and 100 μg L-1, the MPs concentrations in various tissues of O. niloticus generally increased over time following the order gut > gills > liver ≈ brain. Moreover, the acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity in the fish brain was inhibited by MPs exposure, with a maximum inhibition rate of 37.7%, suggesting the potential neurotoxicity of MPs to freshwater fish. The activities of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes [7-ethoxyresorufin O-deethylase (EROD) and 7-benzyloxy-4-trifluoromethyl-coumarin O-dibenzyloxylase (BFCOD)] in the fish liver exhibited clear temporal variabilities, with significant decreases followed by elevations compared to the control. The alterations of the EROD and BFCOD activities indicate the potential involvement of CYP enzymes for the metabolism of MPs. The activity of antioxidative enzyme superoxide dismutase (SOD) in the liver was significantly induced throughout the exposure period, while the malondialdehyde (MDA) content did not vary with MPs exposure, suggesting that the antioxidative enzymatic system in O. niloticus could prevent oxidative damage. These results highlight the ingestion and accumulation of MPs in different tissues of freshwater fish, which lead to perturbations in fish biological systems and should be considered in environmental risk assessment.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b7d35dee5465be3ceb2f502578dff9b20e0b951

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Toxicity of Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Mammalian Systems (2020, background): “In the case of liver, changes in metabolites, key metabolic enzymes, and oxidative stress-induced enzymes occur [49,74,79,81,85,87].”
The presence of microplastics in the digestive tract of commercial fishes off Pantai Indah Kapuk coast, Jakarta, Indonesia (2019, background): “Polystyrene microplastics accumulated in gut > gills > liver and brain of Oreochromis niloticus (Ding et al. 2018).”
A Global Perspective on Microplastics (2020, methodology): “Oxidative stress has also been observed following exposure in a variety of species, including the aforementioned reports on juvenile zebra fish (Lu et al., 2016) and red tilapia (Ding et al., 2018).”
Microplastic prevalence in two fish species in two U.S. reservoirs (2020, background): “Laboratory experiments have also found differences in MP contamination across fish tissue types (e.g., gills, gut, liver, brain), which has been related to particle size (Lu et al. 2016) and length of exposure (Ding et al. 2018).”