Fundamental Toxicological Sciences

Paper Details

Fundamental Toxicological Sciences
Vol. 2 No. 2 May 27, 2015 p.79-82
Letter
Motor activities of newborns prenatally exposed to low-dose bisphenol A in diverse mouse strains
  • Tetsuji Nagao (Laboratory of Developmental Biology, Department of Life Science, Kinki University / tnagao@life.kindai.ac.jp)
Nao Kagawa 1) , Munekazu Komada 2) , Tetsuji Nagao 1)
1) Laboratory of Developmental Biology, Department of Life Science, Kinki University , 2) Department of Anatomy, Aichi Gakuin University
Keywords: Bisphenol A, Motor activity, Newborn, Environmental estrogen, Strain difference
Abstracts

Studies on the low-dose effects of xenoestrogens have yielded conflicting results that may have resulted from differences in estrogen sensitivity between the mouse strains used. We developed a mouse newborn behavioral testing method for evaluating the risk of neurotoxicity of environmental chemicals, by means of determining a newborn’s motor activity through applying the tare function of an analytical balance. Motor activities including crawling, pivoting, and tremors of C57BL/6J and ICR mouse newborns exposed to bisphenol A (BPA) at 200 μg/kg/day on embryonic days 6 through 18 were evaluated for 5 min on postnatal day 1 by the testing method. Motor activities of mature male offspring exposed prenatally to BPA were also evaluated in wheel cage and open field tests. Maternal BPA oral dosing increased the motor activity in newborns of both strains and mature offspring of the C57BL/6J strain. The findings indicate that both mouse strains provide adequate models for the newborn neurobehavioral study of prenatal exposure to environmentally relevant levels of estrogen-mimicking chemicals.