Search results for "sea urchin embryos."
showing 10 items of 16 documents
Autophagy as a defense strategy against stress: focus on Paracentrotus lividus sea urchin embryos exposed to cadmium
2015
Autophagy is used by organisms as a defense strategy to face environmental stress. This mechanism has been described as one of the most important intracellular pathways responsible for the degradation and recycling of proteins and organelles. It can act as a cell survival mechanism if the cellular damage is not too extensive or as a cell death mechanism if the damage/stress is irreversible; in the latter case, it can operate as an independent pathway or together with the apoptotic one. In this review, we discuss the autophagic process activated in several aquatic organisms exposed to different types of environmental stressors, focusing on the sea urchin embryo, a suitable system recently in…
Manganese: A New Emerging Contaminant in the Environment
2012
The environment is composed of the atmosphere, earth and water. According to the World Health Organization, more than 100,000 chemicals are released into the global ambient every year as a consequence of their production, use and disposal. The fate of a chemical substance depends on its chemical application and physical-chemical properties, in combination with the characteristics of the environment where it is released. Chemical substances or contaminants discharged into the environment may be “natural” or “manmade”. One of the most misunderstood concepts regarding contamination is the missinterpretation of term “natural”. A “natural” contaminant is one substance that can occur without huma…
From stress proteins to apoptosis and autophagy in sea urchin embryos
2019
Marine invertebrates inhabit a key position as intermediate consumers in the pelagic as well as in the benthonic food chains, making them suitable model systems for ecotoxicological studies. Among benthonic organisms, echinoderms represent a simple, though significant, model system to test how specific stress can simultaneously provoke dangerous effects on growth and vitality of organisms. Sea urchins provide an attractive and exceptional model for investigating environmental pollution. Most studies investigating the effects of Cd stress were conducted on Paracentrotus lividus, one of the most important marine invertebrates used as bioindicator of metal/heavy metal pollution and an importan…
Autophagy is related to apoptosis in Paracentrotus lividus embryos cadmium exposed
2012
P. lividus embryo offers an excellent opportunity to investigate the adaptive response of cells exposed to different stress. We previously demonstrated that cadmium treatment triggers the accumulation of metal in embryonic cells and the activation of defense system depending on concentration and exposure time, through the synthesis of HSPs and/or the initiation of apoptosis. Analysing autophagy, by neutral red, acridine orange and LC3-detection, we demonstrated that Cd-exposed embryos adopt this process as an additional stratagem to safeguard the developmental program. We observed that embryos treated at subletal Cd concentration activate a massive autophagic response after 18h, which decre…
Relationship between autophagy and apoptosis in Paracentrotus lividus embryos cadmium exposed
2011
Cadmium is a strong toxicant for living organism since it does not have biological roles and can cause several cellular damages comprising genotoxicity, oxidative stress, and other biochemical dysfunctions. Marine invertebrate embryos represent a suitable model system where to investigate the effects of many stressors on development and cell viability. Here we investigated the toxic effect of cadmium on sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus embryos focusing our attention on metal-inducead autophagy and the possible temporal and functional relationship with apoptosis. Using several techniques to detect autophagy (neutral red, acridine orange and LC3-detection) we demonstrated that Cd-exposed P. l…
Toxicity of vanadium during development of sea urchin embryos: bioaccumulation, calcium depletion, ERK modulation and cell-selective apoptosis
2022
Vanadium toxicology is a topic of considerable importance as this metal is widely used in industrial and biomedical fields. However, it represents a potential emerging environmental pollutant because wastewater treatment plants do not adequately remove metal compounds that are subsequently released into the environment. Vanadium applications are limited due to its toxicity, so it is urgent to define this aspect. This metal is associated with sea urchin embryo toxicity as it perturbs embryogenesis and skeletogenesis, triggering several stress responses. Here we investigated its bioaccumulation and the correlation with cellular and molecular developmental pathways. We used cytotoxic concentra…
Gene expression during early embryogenesis of sea urchin: The histone and homeobox genes
1997
Transcriptional regulators are thought to play a key role in cell fate determination and territorial specification in sea urchin. Our goals are to clone transcription factors for studying embryonic development. One approach has been to use promoter binding and gene transfer technology to investigate the mechanisms of transcriptional activation and repression of the early H2A histone gene. By this analysis we identified a transcriptional activator, the MBF-1, that binds to the modulator element of the H2A gene and enhances the activity of the H2A promoter. However, the enhancer activity of the modulator and its interaction with MBF-1 also occurs at the gastrula stage when the early histone g…
Vanadium Modulates Proteolytic Activities and MMP-14-Like Levels during Paracentrotus lividus Embryogenesis
2022
The increasing industrial use of vanadium (V), as well as its recent medical use in various pathologies has intensified its environmental release, making it an emerging pollutant. The sea urchin embryo has long been used to study the effects induced by metals, including V. In this study we used an integrated approach that correlates the biological effects on embryo development with proteolytic activities of gelatinases that could better reflect any metal-induced imbalances. V-exposure caused morphological/morphometric aberrations, mainly concerning the correct distribution of embryonic cells, the development of the skeleton, and the embryo volume. Moreover, V induced a concentration change …
Marine Invertebrates as Bioindicators of Heavy Metal Pollution
2014
Atmosphere, earth and water compose the environment. The presence of heavy metals in the environment has grown because of their large employment in some industrial and agricultural activities. Although these metals are terrestrial products, they flow into the sea through effluents and sewage or are directly discharged from industries placed on the seawater front. It should be considered that metals concentrations vary widely according to different seawater latitudes and depths and can be strongly influenced by fresh water discharges from heavily polluted rivers. In this review recent studies on heavy metal pollution in marine ecosystems and their organisms will be presented. Metal speciatio…
Strategie di difesa attivate in risposta a stress, in embrioni di Paracentrotus lividus
2012
Sea urchin embryos are able to activate different defense strategies against stress. This model system allows to investigate numerous phenomena in multipotent cells, which interact among themselves, in their natural position, bypassing the disadvantages of isolated cells, deprived of their normal network. Cadmium (Cd) treatment triggers the accumulation of metal in embryonic cells and the activation of defense systems depending on concentration and exposure time, through the synthesis of heat shock proteins and/or the initiation of apoptosis. Here we show that Paracentrotus lividus embryos exposed to subacute/sublethal concentrations of Cd adopt autophagy as an additional stratagem to safeg…