Toxicity of microplastics polystyrene to freshwater planarians and the alleviative effects of anthocyanins

Abstract

It is impossible to overlook the effects of microplastics (MPs) on aquatic organisms as they continuously accumulate in water environment. Freshwater planarians, which exist in the benthic zone of water bodies and come into contact with the deposited MPs particles, provide a highly representative model for studying the effects of MPs on aquatic organisms. Anthocyanins (ANTs) have gained significant popularity in recent years for their diverse health benefits. In the current study, the median lethal concentration (LC₅₀) of polystyrene (PS) to planarian Dugesia japonica was determined for the first time. Based on this, multiple toxic effects of single PS and PS in combination with ANTs on planarians were explored. The results showed that PS exposure disrupted the redox homeostasis and induced oxidative damage in planarians. Also, PS stress affected the neuromorphology, aggravated cell apoptosis in planarians probably by altering neural gene expressions as well as promoting the expression of apoptosis-related genes while inhibiting stem cell marker genes. In addition, the results also suggested that co-exposure of ANTs could effectively alleviate the toxicity of PS on planarians. Particularly, long-term environmentally relevant concentration PS exposure exhibited a higher propensity for inducing toxicity on planarians than short-term high concentration acute exposure, indicating that the harm of environmental MPs to humans and wildlife exposed to them should not be underestimated. Therefore, considering the recently rising and rapid development of ecotoxicomics, more in-depth research on the toxicity mechanism of environmentally relevant concentration PS-MPs to freshwater planarians from multi-omics levels will be our future work.