Skip Navigation
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Use this QR code to view the newest version of this document
Use this QR code to view the newest version of this document

Your Environment. Your Health.

Publication Detail

Title: Systematic Analysis of Environmental Chemicals That Dysregulate Critical Period Plasticity-Related Gene Expression Reveals Common Pathways That Mimic Immune Response to Pathogen.

Authors: Smith, Milo R; Yevoo, Priscilla; Sadahiro, Masato; Readhead, Ben; Kidd, Brian; Dudley, Joel T; Morishita, Hirofumi

Published In Neural Plast, (2020)

Abstract: The tens of thousands of industrial and synthetic chemicals released into the environment have an unknown but potentially significant capacity to interfere with neurodevelopment. Consequently, there is an urgent need for systematic approaches that can identify disruptive chemicals. Little is known about the impact of environmental chemicals on critical periods of developmental neuroplasticity, in large part, due to the challenge of screening thousands of chemicals. Using an integrative bioinformatics approach, we systematically scanned 2001 environmental chemicals and identified 50 chemicals that consistently dysregulate two transcriptional signatures of critical period plasticity. These chemicals included pesticides (e.g., pyridaben), antimicrobials (e.g., bacitracin), metals (e.g., mercury), anesthetics (e.g., halothane), and other chemicals and mixtures (e.g., vehicle emissions). Application of a chemogenomic enrichment analysis and hierarchical clustering across these diverse chemicals identified two clusters of chemicals with one that mimicked an immune response to pathogen, implicating inflammatory pathways and microglia as a common chemically induced neuropathological process. Thus, we established an integrative bioinformatics approach to systematically scan thousands of environmental chemicals for their ability to dysregulate molecular signatures relevant to critical periods of development.

PubMed ID: 32454811 Exiting the NIEHS site

MeSH Terms: Animals; Brain/growth & development*; Brain/metabolism; Computational Biology; Environmental Monitoring/methods*; Environmental Pollutants/analysis*; Gene Expression Profiling; Genomics; Immunity/genetics*; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Neuronal Plasticity/genetics*; Transcriptome/genetics*

Back
to Top