Plastic leachate-induced toxicity during sea urchin embryonic development: Insights into the molecular pathways affected by PVC

Developmental toxicity of pre-production plastic pellets affects a large swathe of invertebrate taxa

“…Only for Schmidtea mediterranea, leachates were obtained and diluted in Planarian Artificial Medium (1X PAM) (Cebrià & Newmark, 2005) rather than FSW. We tested 10% nurdle leachates and 1%, 5% and 10% PVC leachates (v/v), concentrations which had previously been shown to induce aberrant phenotypes in echinoderms (Rendell-Bhatti et al, 2021;Paganos et al, 2023), to produce comparable results with our previous work. Tests with lower concentrations than the ones used here did not produce evident aberrant phenotypes.…”

“…Oxidative stress is highly involved in the effects of plastic and plastic-leachate treatments in marine larvae ( (Paganos et al, 2023); also reviewed in (Hu & Palić, 2020)) and adults (Jeong et al, 2017;Pérez-Albaladejo, Solé & Porte, 2020;Milito et al, 2020;Murano et al, 2023). Recently, our lab and others have shown that adult sea urchins subjected to higher oxidative stress produce less successful embryos than animals in normal physiological conditions (Masullo et al, 2021;Jimenez-Guri et al, 2023).…”

“…During manufacturing, these nurdles are combined with various chemical compounds, including plasticizers, stabilizers, and antioxidants, necessary to impart specific physical properties to the final products. These chemical compounds are readily transferred to the water (Mato et al, 2001; Rendell-Bhatti et al, 2021; Paganos et al, 2023) in the case of the nurdles being lost at sea (Sewwandi et al, 2022). Once in the water, they have the ability to concentrate environmental pollutants and transport and release them to a different location, often far from the source of contamination (Teuten et al, 2009).…”

“…Their developmental strategy, combined with the absence of a protective eggshell, make them vulnerable to contamination from plastic leachates. Plastic leachate toxicity has been shown to have negative effects on the development of several marine organisms (Li et al, 2016; Oliviero et al, 2019; Gardon et al, 2020), and in particular, plastic pre-production pellet leachates can disrupt the development of sea urchins (Nobre et al, 2015; Rendell-Bhatti et al, 2021; Paganos et al, 2023) and to some extent brown mussels (Gandara e Silva et al, 2016). However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding how universal the susceptibility to this contamination is across other animal groups.…”

Single and composite damage mechanisms of soil polyethylene/polyvinyl chloride microplastics to the photosynthetic performance of soybean (Glycine max [L.] merr.)

“…In our present study, the noticeable decrease of Chl contents in leaves of soybean suffered PE-MPs and PVC-MPs single or composite contamination ( Figure 2A ). PVC-MPs slowly release additives containing toxic substances from the production process in the environment, causing more serious oxidative damage to plants, increased soybean ROS content and T-SOD enzyme activity ( Paganos et al., 2022 ), increased T-SOD enzyme and peroxidase activity decreased photosynthetic gene transcription and chlorophyll reduction ( Shahi Khalaf Ansar et al., 2022 ). We believe that the most severe oxidative damage to PVC-treated soybeans is the main reason for the lowest Chl content in PVC treatment.…”