Pharmaceutical pollution in water has been of rising concern in recent years, along with water pollution due to cosmetics, personal care items and insect controlling products. Not all of the chemicals from these products can be fully removed in water treatment facilities—and this low-level exposure to chemicals with warming water temperatures showed to influence gene expression in the offspring of North American fish, according to a new study from Oregon State University.
The new study, published in the journal PeerJ, also detailed how warmer water and exposure to chemicals known as Endocrine Disrupting Compounds, or EDCs, have been found to impact sex determination in fish, along with lower fertility rates, deformities and skewed sex ratios.
In the lab, the Oregon researchers studied three generations of inland silverside fish. They chose to work with silverside fish because they are a model for other animals— including alligators and turtles who may also be impacted by increasing temperatures—with temperature sensitive sex determination, Susanne Brander, Ph.D., and Bethany DeCourten told Laboratory Equipment.
DeCourten, who worked in Brander’s lab, is a doctoral student at Oregon State University and the study’s lead author. Brander is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology at Oregon State University.
The team exposed the three generations of fish to two different endocrine disrupting compounds in water that was 22 degrees and 28 degrees Celsius. The chemical exposure was equivalent to a drop in a large pool and the water temperatures were mirrored with those predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.