Generational Effects of Roundup and Its Components on Wild Type and Daf-9 C. Elegans

Overview

When exposed to high stress levels, organisms tend to pass on certain phenotypic traits or tolerance levels to their offspring, sometimes through epigenetics. This experiment explores the epigenetic tolerances that Roundup® and its component ingredients create in the model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. If a significant percentage of the nematodes can survive an exposure to a low dilution of Roundup®, their progeny may have a higher tolerance, survival rate, and lessened stress response to Roundup® due to epigenetic changes caused by the experience of the parent. To expand upon our previous research, we treated both the wild type and a daf-9 mutant strain, which has been shown to be more stress-resistant than the wild type strain. Rather than treating C. elegans with Roundup® alone, separate plates of nematodes were treated with equivalent concentrations of pure glyphosate (Roundup’s listed active ingredient), polyethoxylated tallow amine (POEA, the second known ingredient of Roundup®, a surfactant) and a combination of glyphosate and POEA (to detect possible synergistic effects of the two ingredients and the possibility of separate unknown toxic ingredients in Roundup®). These strains were treated with Roundup® concentrations increasing from 2% to 5% in increments of 0.5% in order to test whether C. elegans could develop a tolerance to Roundup® over successive generations. In our previous research, the final generation in the control plates, which had not been exposed to Roundup® in earlier generations, were treated with equal dilutions (2.0% Roundup®) to the test plates, which had been subjected to increasing concentrations of Roundup®. In this final generation, the test plates had 100% survival rate while the control plates had 60% and 53% survival, respectively. This suggested that C. elegans have the ability to develop a tolerance to Roundup® over multiple generations, but nematodes that are not predisposed to tolerate Roundup® have a lower survival rate when exposed to Roundup®. Contrary to our previous results, the survival rates for both the generational controls and the experimental groups were all 100% throughout exposure to all of the dilutions of Roundup® and its components. This suggests that our previous results are inconclusive as to whether or not C. elegans developed a tolerance against Roundup® and further stresses the importance of repeating experiments. Because of the expanded nature of this study, differences in experimental methods may, in part, have created these contrary results.

Competition history

• AJAS 2019 Category not listed

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