Ethanol exposure perturbs sea urchin development and disrupts developmental timing
Files
First author draft
Date
2022-07-10
Authors
Rodríguez-Sastre, Nahomie
Shapiro, Nicholas
Hawkins, Dakota Y.
Lion, Alexandra T.
Peyreau, Monique
Correa, Andrea E.
Dionne, Kristin
Bradham, Cynthia A.
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
N. Rodríguez-Sastre, N. Shapiro, D.Y. Hawkins, A.T. Lion, M. Peyreau, A.E. Correa, K. Dionne, C.A. Bradham. 2022. "Ethanol Exposure Perturbs Sea Urchin Development and Disrupts Developmental Timing" https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.07.499183
Abstract
Ethanol is a known vertebrate teratogen that causes craniofacial defects as a component of fetal
alcohol syndrome (FAS). Our results show that sea urchin embryos treated with ethanol similarly
show broad skeletal patterning defects, potentially analogous to the defects associated with FAS.
The sea urchin larval skeleton is a simple patterning system that involves only two cell types: the
primary mesenchymal cells (PMCs) that secrete the calcium carbonate skeleton and the
ectodermal cells that provide migratory, positional, and differentiation cues for the PMCs.
Perturbations in RA biosynthesis and Hh signaling pathways are thought to be causal for the
FAS phenotype in vertebrates. Surprisingly, our results indicate that these pathways are not
functionally relevant for the teratogenic effects of ethanol in developing sea urchins. We found
that developmental morphology as well as the expression of ectodermal and PMC genes was
delayed by ethanol exposure. Temporal transcriptome analysis revealed significant impacts of
ethanol on signaling and metabolic gene expression, and a disruption in the timing of GRN gene
expression that includes both delayed and precocious gene expression throughout the
specification network. We conclude that the skeletal patterning perturbations in ethanol-treated
embryos likely arise from a loss of temporal synchrony within and between the instructive and
responsive tissues.
Description
License
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.