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Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) induces behavioural, reproductive and developmental toxicological impacts in Caenorhabditis elegans at concentrations relevant to the contaminated areas

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posted on 2025-05-11, 18:26 authored by Tanmoy Sana, Manjurul Islam Chowdhury, Panneerselvan Logeshwaran, Rajarathnam Dharmarajan, Mallavarapu Megharaj
Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) is a prevalent, persistent organic pollutant (POP) in the environment. The potential toxic impacts of PFOA on human and ecological health is becoming an increasing concern worldwide. In this study, we investigated the acute toxicity of PFOA in terms of growth, mortality, lifespan, neurobehaviour, fecundity and livelihood in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a free-living ecologically important animal model species. The acute toxicity (LC50) of PFOA was found to be 4.42 µM (1.83 mg/L). PFOA exposure induced alteration in locomotor behaviour in C. elegans. The reproduction capacity of C. elegans was also reduced after exposure to 0.1 µM (41.4 µg/L) PFOA. Similarly, developmental toxicity was also documented with the reduction in lifespan and alteration in chemotaxis plasticity above 1 µM (414 µg/L) PFOA. C. elegans bioaccumulated PFOA about 520 times than the surrounding concentration when exposed to 0.41 ug/L PFOA. Given that PFOA has demonstrated its toxicological impacts on the reproductive capacity and lifespan of C. elegans at the concentrations that are commonly found at contaminated areas, it is likely that the contamination of PFOA will have detrimental effects on the food chain in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Thus, the results of this study have significant implications for the ecological risk assessment and remediation of PFOA.

History

Journal title

Environmental Advances

Volume

4

Issue

July 2021

Article number

100053

Publisher

Elsevier

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

College of Engineering, Science and Environment

School

Global Centre for Environmental Remediation (GCER)

Rights statement

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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