Widely application of chlorpyrifos (CPF) and carbaryl (CAR) in agricultural and domestic settings is a serious threat to human health.Health risks caused by environmental polution are usually the outcome of chronic, low-dose and long-term exposure. It is generally not possible to deduce the combined toxicity of pesticides from traditional acute toxicity test. 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolomics is an emerging interdisciplinary in recent years, which is a combination of physics, mathematics, analytical chemistry and information science on biological research. It is used to investigate the overall biological status of the body and function of the regulation through the analysis of metabolite spectrum of biological fluids and tissue extracts. Metabolomics plays an important role in promoting the research fields of toxicology studies, disease diagnosis, functional genomics, and so on.
Professor Yi-Jun Wu and his team (Laboratory of Molecular Toxicology in the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) has successfully assessed the alterations of 1H NMR metabolic profiles of serum in rats following the treatment with CPF and CAR alone or in combination. Metabonomic analysis indicated that subchronic exposure to CPF and CAR alone, or in combination, could cause a disturbance in energy and fatty acid metabolism in the liver mitochondria of rats. CPF in combination with CAR did not show much more toxic effect on rats, compared to single pesticide. The analysis of metabolic profiles can make exceptional contributions to the understanding of the individual or mutual effects following chronic exposure to a low dose of pesticides.
The results of this work were recently published in Chemical Research in Toxicology (Wang HP, Liang YJ, Long DX, Chen JX, Hou WY, Wu YJ. Metabolic profiles of serum from rats after subchronic exposure to chlorpyrifos and carbaryl. Chem. Res. Toxicol., 2009, 22: 1026-1033). This work was supported by a grant from the National High Technologies R&D Program of China (2006AA06Z423).
The 5th International Conference on Rodent Biol...
