Hazardous effects of octopamine receptor agonists on altering metabolism-related genes and behavior of Drosophila melanogaster
Introduction
Pesticides play a vital role in controlling pests in agricultural crops and public health. The significance of pesticides in terms of secure food production and negative outputs are important issues (Ahmed and Othman, 2020; Mandi et al., 2019). For instance, pesticide resistance, contamination problems, declination of honeybees and pollination, and potential health effects are an increasing global problem. Regarding the public health awareness and rise of environmental health risks, the prevention of hazardous pesticides is indicated and the substitution with safe pesticides is needed (Zhang et al., 2018).
Formamidines, a group of pesticides that have various mechanisms of action, are used to control animal and crop pests worldwide (Ahmed and Matsumura, 2012; Kita et al., 2017; Gao et al., 2019). Interestingly, formamidines have a unique mode of action serving as agonists on octopamine receptors (ORs) in mosquitoes, locusts, cockroaches, and mites (Ahmed et al., 2015; Monteiro et al., 2019). Formamidines disrupt monoamine-mediated production of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) and induce adverse behavioral changes in treated insects, which are considered the most important feature of their insecticidal actions (Ahmed et al., 2015; Kita et al., 2017).
Formamidine pesticides are quickly absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and eliminated; they are harmful to human health, particularly to children, through accidental exposure. Ingestion is considered the most common pathway of exposure, whereas in a small number of cases percutaneous exposure was reported (Dhooria and Agarwal, 2016; Moyano et al., 2019).
Drosophila melanogaster, first described by Meigen in 1830, is considered a standard model for toxicological studies of xenobiotics in insects (Koon and Chan, 2017; Zhang et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019). Importantly, the genome of D. melanogaster has been completely sequenced, and the structural and functional genome has been found to be comparable to the human genome (Zhang et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019). Interestingly, approximately 75% of the genes that are involved in the development of human diseases are evolutionarily conserved across animal species, including Drosophila (Cheng et al., 2018). In addition, D. melanogaster has a short lifecycle, is easy to maintain in culture in the laboratory, produces many eggs, and has a low number of chromosomes (only four pairs). These characteristics of D. melanogaster make them amenable to molecular analyses (Zhang et al., 2018; Anet et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2019).
The present work aims to evaluate the acute toxicity of OR agonists on third instar larvae and adults. We assessed the effects of sublethal concentrations of OR agonists on growth, development, and reproduction of D. melanogaster, and determined changes in gene expression relevant in development and metabolism.
Section snippets
Insect material
D. melanogaster wild type (w1118) were kindly provided by Dr. Joanna Chiu, the University of California Davis and used for all experiments. Flies were maintained at 25 °C at a relative humidity of 70% under a light/dark cycle of 12-h vials (50 ml) containing a standard potato based medium which was obtained from Carolina Biological Supply Co. (Burlington, NC, USA).
Chemicals
Chlordimeform (99.8%) and Amitraz (96.8%) were purchased from Sigma–Aldrich Co. (St. Louis, MO, USA) (Table 1).
Acute toxicity assay
The acute toxicity
Acute toxicity
The acute toxicity results are presented in Table 3. The LC50 values of AMZ and CDM on third instar larvae were 120.68 and 76.06 μg/ml, respectively, whereas the LC50 values on adults were 377.45 and 201.00 μg/ml, respectively, after 24-h of exposure. Further, the toxicity index data indicates that CDM was more efficient than AMZ on both third instar larvae and adults (1.59 and 1.88-fold, respectively (Table 4).
Based on the tolerance ratio values, the adults of D. melanogaster demonstrated a
Discussion
Octopamine receptor agonists, such as formamidine compounds, were investigated in numerous studies based on their biological and pharmacological properties (Zhou et al., 2008; Del Pino et al., 2017; Meriç Turgut and Keskin, 2017; Gao et al., 2019; Monteiro et al., 2019). To date, few studies focus on dipterous insects. In particular, there is limited data that exits on the possible biochemical and molecular biological effects of OR agonists on D. melanogaster. In this study, we focused on the
Conclusion
This study provides evidence that OR agonists trigger various sublethal effects on development, lifespan, eclosion, and reproduction. The changes of these phenotypes are likely due to the significant effects on the expression of genes, which are important regulators of these processes. The results contribute a solid reference for the effects of OR agonists on D. melanogaster. Further investigation is needed in order to better understand behaviors such as locomotion, aggression, grooming, and
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim Ahmed: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Supervision, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Christoph Franz Adam Vogel: Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Supervision, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported and funded by a post-doctoral scholarship for the senior author (M.A.I.A.) from the Ministry of Higher Education, the Government of Egypt, grant number, SAB 2216 and by a seed grant of the University of California Davis, USA, Environmental Health Sciences Core Center (C.F.A.V.). We are grateful to Dr. Joanna Chiu, Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis (UC Davis), for kindly providing us with Drosophila melanogaster that were used for
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Short exposure to nitenpyram pesticide induces effects on reproduction, development and metabolic gene expression profiles in Drosophila melanogaster (Diptera: Drosophilidae)
2022, Science of the Total EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :The number of deaths was recorded every day until the last fly died. To better understand the role of nitenpyram and its effects on the modifying the behavior of D. melanogaster, we followed the method of Ahmed and Vogel (2020a), with some modification. 4–5-day old adult flies were exposed for 24-h to two different concentrations of LC50 values, one-tenth (3.81 μg/mL) and one-third (12.69 μg/mL) nitenpyram, respectively.