bisphenol A

Maze Runners

October 20, 2015 By Roger Meissen in Research 19,637 Comments Tags: bisphenol A, Bond Life Sciences Center, BPA, CLARITY-BPA consortium, endocrine disruptors

Female rats struggle to find their way in BPA study from MU and the NCTR/FDA

Cheryl Rosenfeld is one of 12 researchers partnering with the NCTR/FDA to study BPA

Despite concerns about bisphenol A (BPA), academic and regulatory scientists have yet to reach a consensus on BPA’s safety.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Toxicology Program (NTP), the Food and Drug Administration and independent university researchers are working together to change that.

Five years after the Consortium Linking Academic and Regulatory Insights on BPA Toxicity, or CLARITY-BPA for short, launched, results are beginning to come in. This new information will allow researchers to better compare the effects of fixed doses of BPA on the brain, various cognitive behaviors, reproduction and fertility, accumulation of fat tissue, heart disease, the immune system, and several types of cancers.

“The idea of this Consortium is to examine the potential systems that have been previously suggested to be affected by BPA,” said Cheryl Rosenfeld, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri and one of twelve researchers involved in the project.

Rosenfeld’s group looked at spatial navigation learning and memory. They found that prenatal exposure to BPA could potentially hinder the ability of female rats to learn to find their way through a maze. This effect was not seen in male rats.

Approved by the FDA in the early 1960s, BPA can be found in a wide variety of products, including plastic food and drink containers with recycle codes 3 or 7, water and baby bottles, toys, the linings of metal cans and water pipes, even patient blood and urine samples.

BPA has structural similarities to estrogen and can potentially act as a weak estrogen in the body.

In Rosenfeld’s experiment, researchers at the National Center for Toxicology Research gave pregnant rats a fixed dose of BPA every day: a low, medium, or high dose.

After the baby rats were born, researchers continued to dose the babies, both male and female, according to what their mothers had received.

When these rats reached three months old, they were tested in a circular maze with twenty possible exit holes, one of which was designated as the correct escape hole. Every day for seven days, researchers tested the rats’ abilities to solve the maze in five minutes and timed them as they ran.

Rats solve mazes in three ways, Rosenfeld said.

They can run through the labyrinth in a spiral pattern, hugging the outer walls, and work their way in until they find the correct exit hole in what is called a serial search strategy.

Or they might move aimlessly in the maze using an indirect search strategy, Rosenfeld said. “In this case, the rats seemingly find the correct escape hole by random chance.”

Lastly, they can travel directly from the center of the maze to the correct escape hole. The third strategy is considered the most efficient method because the rats find their way swiftly, Rosenfeld said.

Sarah Johnson, a graduate student and first author on the paper, assessed each rat’s performance in the maze using a three-point tracking program that recognizes the rat’s nose, body, and tail.

Using the program, Johnson measured their performances in terms of the total distance traveled, the speed at which the rat ran the maze, how long it took the rats to solve the maze (latency), and how often the rat sniffed at an incorrect hole.

The last two parameters are considered the best gauges of spatial navigation learning and memory.

“What you expect to see is that they should start learning where that correct escape hole is,” Rosenfeld said. “Thus, their latency and sniffing incorrect holes should decrease over time.”

Rosenfeld’s group found that female rats that had been exposed to the highest dose of BPA since fetal development were less likely to find the escape hole than rats that hadn’t been exposed to BPA.

As for how this study may translate to people, Rosenfeld said, “the same brain regions control identical behaviors in rodents and humans.”

She considers it a starting point for setting up future experiments that take into consideration sex differences in cognitive behaviors and neurological responses to BPA.

Immediate next steps for the Rosenfeld group include analyzing tissue collected from the brains of rats that had undergone maze testing. Rosenfeld’s team of researchers will measure DNA methylation and RNA expression in the brain to determine which genes might be involved in navigational learning and memory. Their overarching goal is to determine how changes in observed sex- and dose-dependent behaviors occur on the molecular level.

NIEHS grant U01 ES020929 supported this research. Additional coauthors include Mark Ellersieck and Angela Javurek of the University of Missouri, Thomas H. Welsh Jr. of Texas A&M University, and Sherry Ferguson, Sherry Lewis, and Michelle Vanlandingham of the National Center of Toxicological Research/Food and Drug Administration. Read the full study on the Hormones and Behavior website and browse the supplementary data for this work.

Poor parenting or BPA?

June 3, 2015 By Roger Meissen in Research Tags: bisphenol A, Bond LSC, BPA, endocrine disruptors

Endocrine disruptors alter parent behavior in California mice

California mice exposed to bisphenol A (BPA) or ethinyl estradiol changed their parenting behavior, according to an MU Bond LSC study. | Photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC

By Roger Meissen | MU Bond Life Sciences Center

What if a chemical changes the way an animal parents?

That could happen due to endocrine disruptors like bisphenol A (BPA).

A recent study of California mice exposed to BPA showed parents spend less time feeding, grooming and interacting with their babies, according to University of Missouri research. Even mother mice not exposed to the chemical parented differently if their male partner was exposed during development.

Most studies only use laboratory mice and rats — where the mother is the sole parental provider — so how early contact to BPA may affect the father and his partner remained a critical gap in existing research.

Bond LSC researcher Cheryl Rosenfeld | Photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC

“The nature and extent of care received by an infant is important because it can affect social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Cheryl Rosenfeld, a researcher in MU’s Bond Life Sciences Center and associate professor of biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine. “We found that females who were exposed early on to BPA spent less time nursing, so the pups likely did not receive the normal health benefits ascribed to nursing. Likewise, we found that developmental exposure of males and females resulted in them spending more time out of the nest and away from their pups, further suggesting that biparental care was reduced.”

BPA and other endocrine disrupting chemicals like ethinyl estradiol (EE) — found in birth control — concern scientists because they build up in the environment and mimic natural hormones produced by animals, including humans. Everyday exposure to these chemicals can impact offspring development and now have been found to alter adult behavior in test animals.

California mice have special significance for studying parental behavior. Unlike most lab mice, Californian mice pair up to mate and care for offspring. This monogamous behavior could give researchers insight into child rearing behavior found in most human societies and other biparental animals that would be impossible to measure in lab mice and rats.

MU graduate student and primary author Sarah Johnson worked with Rosenfeld to design the study to look at both sexes. Female and male mice were fed one of three diets — food supplemented with BPA or ethinyl estradiol or endocrine-free (control) food — two weeks before breeding. The mice were then randomly paired with the same mate for the entire study. The behavior of both sexes was then tracked for activities like time spent grooming pups, time spent in the nest and time mothers spent nursing.

But how do you measure the behavior of parents?

Rosenfeld’s team depended on hundreds of hours of video footage, taken at particular times of day and night for seven days, starting two days prior to birth. By using infrared cameras they tracked all 56 litters of mice, logging the number of and duration of activities mothers and fathers completed. During this time, the body weight and temperature of the F2 pups, who were not directly or fetally exposed to any chemicals, was logged to monitor their development.

While results showed reduced pup attention from BPA/EE exposed mother mice, the most intriguing result showed that unexposed moms mated with exposed fathers reduced the time they groomed and cared for offspring.

“These female mice have not been exposed here, but if you can see they are still reducing parental care when paired with the BPA/EE-exposed males,” Rosenfeld said. “And what’s even more interesting is that if a mother and father are both exposed, that parental care diminishes further, and becomes even more statistically significant.”

Researchers hope these results will spur others to look at long-term effects of endocrine disruptors on parenting behavior from generation to generation in animal models and, more importantly, in humans, to see if these chemicals can disrupt parental behavior of mothers and fathers, and if so, whether these effects can be transmitted to subsequent generations.

The study, “Disruption of Parenting Behaviors in California Mice, a Monogomous Rodent Species, by Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals,” was funded by the National Institutes of Health (Grant: 5R21ES023150-02) and was published in the journal PLoS One.