Rotenone, an environmental toxin, causes abnormal methylation of the mouse brain organoid's genome and ferroptosis

More and more reports have pointed out that rotenone, as an insecticide, has high neurotoxicity and reproductive toxicity to livestock and mammals. As a highly physiological correlation system of internal organs, quasi-organs have great potential in the fields of drug toxicity and efficacy test, toxicology research, developmental biology and so on. In this study, brain organs (mBOs) derived from mouse neural stem cells were used to investigate the effects of rotenone on the physiological activity and epigenetic modification of mBOs. At the same time, Rotenone could significantly stimulate the increase of the concentration of LPO, lactic acid and hydroxyl radical in mBOs, and inhibit the expression of neuronal marker Tuj1, CHAT, PAX6 and so on. Further analysis showed that Rotenonem could induce mitochondrial damage in mBOs. The results of qPCR and Western blot showed that Rotenone could up-regulate the expressions of ferroptosis promoting protein p53, Cox2 and so on, while inhibit the expressions of negative regulatory protein of ferroptosis GPX4, FTH1, SLC7A11. In addition, the results of RRBS-Seq sequencing showed that the methylation modification at DMR level in Rotenone-treated mBOs group was significantly higher than that in Ctrl group. The results of KEGG analysis showed that compared with Ctrl, the genes with hypermethylation of promoter and Genebody in Rotenone-treated mBOs were mainly located in the Neuro active ligand-receptor interaction signal transduction pathway. In summary, rotenone can significantly lead to abnormal methylation of mouse brain organs, and lead to the loss of normal physiological function of neurons by inducing ferroptosis.