Parental Tetracycline Hydrochloride Exposure and Resultant Offspring Cartilage Toxicity.

Antibiotics are widely used as veterinary drugs and feed additives, especially for broad-spectrum antibiotics such as tetracycline, which have been abused in the breeding industry. Tetracycline is the antibiotics with the largest dosage and the widest application. Antibiotics accumulate in the body or are excreted into the environment via feces as a prototype, causing environmental pollution. This experiment used zebrafish as a model organism to evaluate the effects of low concentration of tetracycline on the transgenerational (F1) zebrafish. Parent zebrafish (F0, approximantely 4-month-old) were exposed to 0.1, 1 and 100 µg⋅L^-1 of tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH) for 30 d. The F1 generation zebrafish embryos were obtained. The results showed that the F1 generation embryos had a decreased hatching rate and an increased malformation rate and mortality rate, all of which were concentration-dependent. In addition, the zebrafish juvenile had longer mandible and mandibular arch and more narrow mandible and shorter hyoid bone. Furthermore, transcriptional expression of runx1, sox9a, sox10and col2α 1a(genes related to skeletal development of juvenile fish) were inhibited by exposure to TCH. This study demonstrates that TCH showed a transgenerational effect by affecting the development of zebrafish embryos, especially the development of embryonic cartilage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]