Prenatal exposure to low-dose bisphenol A disrupts hippocampal DNA methylation and demethylation in male rat offspring.
Yuxin WangYi GuoJiajia RenQiling LiuChong WangPublished in: Toxicology and industrial health (2024)
Earlier research has demonstrated that developmental exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has persistent impacts on both adult brain growth and actions. It has been suggested that BPA might obstruct the methylation coding of the genes in the brain. In this study, the methylation changes in the hippocampus tissue of male rat pups were examined following prenatal BPA exposure. Pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were treated with either vehicle (tocopherol-stripped corn oil) or BPA (4, 40, or 400 μg/kg·body weight/day) throughout the entire duration of gestation and lactation. At 3 weeks of age, the male rat offspring were euthanized, and the hippocampus were dissected out for analysis. The expression levels of DNA methyltransferases (DNMT1, DNMT3A, and DNMT3B) and DNA demethylases (TET1, Gadd45a, Gadd45b, and Apobec1) were analyzed in the hippocampus by means of quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting, respectively. The results showed that prenatal exposure to BPA upregulated the expression of enzymes associated with DNA methylation and demethylation processes in the hippocampus of male rat offspring. These findings suggest that prenatal exposure to a low dose of BPA could potentially disrupt the balance of methylation and demethylation in the hippocampus, thereby perturbing epigenetic modifications. This may represent a neurotoxicity mechanism of BPA.
Keyphrases
- dna methylation
- genome wide
- cerebral ischemia
- low dose
- pregnant women
- gene expression
- body weight
- high fat diet
- poor prognosis
- oxidative stress
- prefrontal cortex
- cognitive impairment
- subarachnoid hemorrhage
- high dose
- brain injury
- white matter
- copy number
- preterm infants
- single molecule
- cell free
- resting state
- young adults
- circulating tumor
- metabolic syndrome
- functional connectivity
- skeletal muscle
- binding protein
- high resolution
- newly diagnosed
- childhood cancer