Abstract
The growing use of Lanthanides in new technologies has increased their anthropogenic releases into the aquatic environment over the last decades. However, knowledge on their ecotoxicological impacts is still incomplete, especially with regard to biological effects of Lanthanides mixtures and the possible regular variation in toxicity along the Lanthanides series. The present study evaluated the individual toxicity of all Lanthanides and the toxicity of mixtures of three of them, namely Neodymium (Nd3+), Gadolinium (Gd3+), and Ytterbium (Yb3+) on Danio rerio fibroblast-like cells (ZF4). Individual and mixtures toxicity of Neodymium (Nd3+) and Ytterbium (Yb3+) were also assessed on Danio rerio hepatic cells (ZFL) and Oncorhynchus mykiss epithelial cells (RTgill-W1). The measured Lanthanide concentrations were close to the nominal ones in the culture media of ZF4, ZFL, and RTgill-W1 cells (85–99%). A toxic impact was observed on the three fish cell lines exposed to all Lanthanides tested individually. RTgill-W1 appeared as the less sensitive cells, compared to the two others. Four Lanthanides, Erbium (Er3+), Thulium (Tm3+), Ytterbium (Yb3+) and Lutetium (Lu3+) showed a higher toxicity than the others on ZF4 cells but no correlation could be established between the toxicity of Lanthanides and the order of the elements within the Lanthanides series. Exposures to binary mixtures highlighted the presence of synergistic effects on cell viability for all cell lines.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Clément Bojic and Justine Flayac for technical support in cell culture, and Danièle Pauly for the preparation of the stock solutions of Lanthanides. We warmly thank Davide Vignati for his proofreading and advice in English improvement.
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This work was supported by the Lorraine region and French National Research Agency through the “Ecotoxicology of Rare Earth Elements in Aquatic Systems” project with the reference ANR-16-CE34-0012/ECOTREE.
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CRediT authorship contribution statement EF: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Resources, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing? original draft. MP: Conceptualization, Writing original draft, Supervision. AM: Formal statistic and modelling analysis, Writing original draft. CC-L: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing original draft, Funding acquisition.
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The cellular models ZF4 (ATCC® CRL-2050™) and ZFL (ATCC® CRL-2643™) cells from Danio rerio and RTgill-W1 (ATCC® CRL-2523™) cells from Oncorhynchus mykiss do not benefit from any particular protection status. No legal professional qualification is currently required for their experimental use in the laboratory.
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Fleurbaix, E., Parant, M., Maul, A. et al. Toxicity of lanthanides on various fish cell lines. Ecotoxicology 31, 1147–1157 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-022-02574-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-022-02574-y