Antibiotics and nanoplastics (NPs) are both received increasing attention due to their negative impacts on aquatic biota. The presence of these types of pollutants in water bodies, which are important reservoirs for these compounds, is a continuous threat to ecosystem functions due to their impact on microbial diversity, aquatic fauna, but also for human health, leading to a worrisome environmental situation. Zebrafish can be used as a vertebrate model to monitor the potential impact of antibiotics and NPs in the animal health status. We found that the exposure of zebrafish to an environmentally relevant concentration of the two antibiotics most frequently detected in European inland surface water, sulfamethoxazole (SMX) and clarithromycin (CLA), showed an increased susceptibility to a viral challenge, an altered intestinal microbiota and transcriptome analyses of kidney and intestine samples suggests that complement system impairment is one of the most important mechanisms involved in antibiotic-mediated immunosuppression. On the other hand, since fishes constitute one of the animal groups particularly sensitive to plastic ingestion, zebrafish is also a useful model species to assess the impact of nanomaterials on different aspects of the animal biology. We used zebrafish to study different in vitro and in vivo aspects of exposure to polystyrene NPs, but we also conducted a transcriptome study after treating zebrafish larvae with the surgical masks plastic polymer fibers. Our results revealed an evident impact not only in the immune response, but also in the reproductive system, which were dependent on the particle size

12th European Zebrafish Meeting, Krakow, 9-13 July 2023

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