Environmental Science and Pollution Research

, Volume 22, Issue 22, pp 17434–17442 | Cite as

Comparison on the molecular response profiles between nano zinc oxide (ZnO) particles and free zinc ion using a genome-wide toxicogenomics approach

  • Guanyong Su
  • Xiaowei Zhang
  • John P. Giesy
  • Javed Musarrat
  • Quaiser Saquib
  • Abdulaziz A. Alkhedhairy
  • Hongxia Yu
Molecular and cellular effects of contamination in aquatic ecosystems
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Increasing production and applications of nano zinc oxide particles (nano-ZnO) enhances the probability of its exposure in occupational and environmental settings, but toxicity studies are still limited. Taking the free Zn ion (Zn2+) as a control, cytotoxicity of a commercially available nano-ZnO was assessed with a 6-h exposure in Escherichia coli (E. coli). The fitted dose-cytotoxicity curve for ZnCl2 was significantly sharper than that from nano-ZnO. Then, a genome-wide gene expression profile following exposure to nano-ZnO was conducted by use of a live cell reporter assay system with library of 1820 modified green fluorescent protein (GFP)-expressing promoter reporter vectors constructed from E. coli K12 strains, which resulted in 387 significantly altered genes in bacterial (p < 0.001). These altered genes were enriched into ten biological processing and two cell components (p < 0.05) terms through statistical hypergeometric testing, strongly suggesting that exposure to nano-ZnO would result a great disturbance on the functional gene product synthesis processing, such as translation, gene expression, RNA modification, and structural constituent of ribosome. The pattern of expression of 37 genes altered by nano-ZnO (fold change>2) was different from the profile following exposure to 6 mg/L of free zinc ion. The result indicates that these two Zn forms might cause toxicity to bacterial in different modes of action. Our results underscore the importance of understanding the adverse effects elicited by nano-ZnO after entering aquatic environment.

Keywords

Nanoparticle Cytotoxicity Gene expression Gene set enrichment analysis Pathways 

Notes

Acknowledgments

The research was supported by a grant from Jiangsu science and technology supporting program social development fund (BE2011776). This project was also supported by NSTIP strategic technologies programs (13-ENV2116-02) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Supplementary material

11356_2015_4507_MOESM1_ESM.docx (4.5 mb)
ESM 1(DOCX 4601 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Guanyong Su
    • 1
  • Xiaowei Zhang
    • 1
  • John P. Giesy
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
  • Javed Musarrat
    • 4
  • Quaiser Saquib
    • 4
  • Abdulaziz A. Alkhedhairy
    • 4
  • Hongxia Yu
    • 1
  1. 1.State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, School of the EnvironmentNanjing UniversityNanjingChina
  2. 2.Department of Biomedical Veterinary Sciences and Toxicology CentreUniversity of SaskatchewanSaskatoonCanada
  3. 3.Department of Biology and ChemistryCity University of Hong KongHong KongChina
  4. 4.Zoology Department, College of ScienceKing Saud UniversityRiyadhSaudi Arabia

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