Potential biomarkers for monitoring the toxicity of long-term exposure to atrazine in rat by metabonomic analysis

Abstract

1. Herbicide atrazine (ATR) poses harmful effects on human health. The purpose of this study is to study potential biomarkers used for monitoring the toxic effects after chronic exposure to ATR by studying urine metabolites.

2. Rats were assigned into clinical chemistry and metabonomics arms, and each arm was divided into low-dose, high-dose and control groups. ATR was administered to rats along with their feed. At the end of 16, 20 and 24 weeks, clinical parameters and histopathologic changes was assessed to monitor the toxic effects. Twenty-four hour urine samples was analyzed by UPLC-MS, to find the significant alterations in metabolic profiling.

3. The body weight of rats in ATR group was lower than that of control starting from 12th week; abnormal levels of serum biochemistry and histopathologic alterations of organs were found initially from 16th and 20th week, respectively. Five exogenous and five endogenous metabolites were found which showed significant differences between ATR groups and control group at above-mentioned time points.

4. These metabolites may be used as potential indicators to monitor ATR toxicity, and also may provide some clues for understanding the mechanism of toxicity of ATR. The exact relationship between endogenous metabolites and ATR toxicity needs further investigation.

Keywords:

• Atrazine
• biomarker
• metabonomics
• metabolites
• toxicity
• urine

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 81072333. Thanks Professor Hong Sui as a statistician for providing the support of data analysis.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.