A preliminary gene expression analysis on Paracentrotus lividus embryos exposed to UVB, Cadmium and their combination

Paracentrotus lividus is a Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic sea urchin species, very sensitive to chemical and physical environmental changes and widely used in eco-toxicological studies. Here, we applied a high throughput screening approach on P. lividus embryos exposed to UVB radiation (UV), Cadmium Chloride (Cd) and their combination (Cd/UV), to deeply characterize the molecular responses adopted by embryos to cope with these stressors. in vitro eco-toxicological assays were performed by exposing embryos to Cd (10^-4 M) soon after fertilization, to UV (200 and 400J/m²) at early stage of development, while in co-exposure experiments, Cd-exposed embryos were irradiated with UV at 200 J/m². By NanoString nCounter technology, custom-made probes were developed and hybridized on total RNA extracted from exposed embryos at 51h after fertilization. By in silico analyses, we selected and retrieved at the NCBI nucleotide database a panel of P. lividus transcripts encoding for many regulatory and structural proteins that we ranked in categories, i.e., Apoptosis, Biomineralization, Defense, Development, Immunity, Signaling and Transcription Factors. The analysis of 127 transcripts highlighted the dysregulation of many genes, some specifically activated to cope with stress agents, others involved in the complex molecular network of genes that regulate embryo development. We revealed the downregulation of Biomineralization and Development genes and the upregulation of Defensive genes in Cd and Cd/UV embryos. Our approach, using sea urchin embryo as an in vivomodel, contributes to advance our knowledge about cellular responses to UV, Cd and their combination.