Abstract
Chlorpyrifos (CPF) and glyphosate (GLY) are the most widely used organophosphate insecticide and herbicide worldwide, respectively; co-occurrence of CPF and GLY in aquatic environments occurs where they inevitably have potential hazards to fish. However, the potential mechanisms of CPF and GLY to induce toxicity have not been fully explored. To identify the adverse impacts of CPF and GLY on fish, either alone or in combination (MIX), CPF (25 μg/L) and GLY (3.5 mg/L) were set up according to an environmentally relevant concentration to expose to common carp for 21 days. After exposure, CPF and GLY decreased the activities of acetylcholinesterase and Na+/K+-ATPase, altered monoamine oxidase levels, decreased antioxidant enzyme activities (superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione S-transferase and glutamic reductase), and induced the accumulation of malondialdehyde in the carp brain. The parameters in the MIX groups had a greater impact compared to that in the CPF or GLY group, suggesting that both single and combined exposure could affect neurological signaling systems and cause oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation damage in carp brains, and that MIX exposure increases the impact of each pollutant. RNA-seq results showed that single or combined exposure to CPF and GLY induced global transcriptomic changes in fish brains, and the number of differentially expressed genes in MIX-treated carp brains were globally increased compared to either the CPF or GLY groups, suggesting that the effects of co-exposure were greater than single exposure. Further analysis results revealed that the global transcriptomic changes participated in oxidative stress, immune dysfunction, and apoptosis of fish brains, and identified that the P13k-Akt signaling pathway participates in both single and combined exposure of CPF- and GLY-induced toxicity. Taken together, our results demonstrated that the interaction of CPF and GLY might be synergic and provided novel insights into the molecular mechanisms of fish brains coping with CPF and GLY.