Meeting Abstract
Early life exposure to wastewater effluent (WWE) adversely affects gonadal development in a number of aquatic vertebrates. Amphibians exposed to compounds commonly found in WWE show female skewed sex ratios and high occurrences of intersex gonads. Chronic WWE exposure may influence an organism’s ability to adapt and respond to a changing environment. We hypothesized that there is phenotypic plasticity in molecular endpoints associated with gonadal development in animals exposed to polluted or remediated environments. Rana catesbeiana tadpoles collected from a reference site and a WWE receiving site were used in a reciprocal transplant experiment where half of the tadpoles from each group stayed in their original water, while the other half was exposed to water from the opposite site for 43-45 days. Gonadal tissue was collected for future gross histological evaluation and analysis of two key genes involved in gonadal development, SF-1 and CYP19. Our preliminary findings show sexual dimorphism of SF-1 and CYP19 expression, as well as elevated SF-1 and CYP19 expression in females originally from the WWE receiving site compared to the animals originally from the reference site regardless of their experimental treatment. Our findings suggest that continuous exposure to environmental stressors such as WWE may have the ability to drive differences in what is considered normal reproductive development. Furthermore, these results demonstrate that animals may not be able to respond to shifts in water quality with changes in gene amplicon abundance affecting gonadal development if they have passed a window of development following an exposure.
