New work from the lab! Annelise Blanchette found that brown anole lizards may be the most lead (pb) tolerant vertebrate known to date by integrating physiological studies of field and lab exposed animals and transcriptomics #urbanecology #ecotox #anolis 🦎 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - ThreadSky

agunderson.bsky.social • 75 days ago

New work from the lab! Annelise Blanchette found that brown anole lizards may be the most lead (pb) tolerant vertebrate known to date by integrating physiological studies of field and lab exposed animals and transcriptomics #urbanecology #ecotox #anolis 🦎 1/n

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.06.626998v1

Comments

tonygill.bsky.social•73 days ago

Wow! Sounds like a new model organism just dropped

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

Annelise measured blood lead levels in lizards across New Orleans and found that soil contamination and lizard blood lead are associated. But more interesting, the lizard lead concentrations are really high. In fact...

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

...the highest mean lizard blood lead level at a site was way higher than that of any free-ranging vertebrate that we could find published. The highest individual level (>3000 ug/dL) was also higher than any other that we could find. These values are extreme and should affect the lizards. But...

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

...Annelise brought field exposed lizards into the lab and measured a bunch of whole-organism traits usually affected by lead, and there were no negative effects (the lizards actually ran faster with more lead!). So what is there blood lead toxicity threshold? To find out...

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

...Annelise dosed lizards. No negative effects were found until blood lead was over 10,000 ug/dL. For context, similar thresholds in birds and mammals are usually under 100 ug/dL. These lizards have extreme, if not the most extreme, lead tolerance known. How do they deal with lead? To find out...

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

...transcriptomes of high and low lead lizards were compared. Few genes (<100) were differentially expressed between groups. But some cool ones pop up, including many ion transporters and hemoglobins (lead is usually bad for oxygen transport). Stay tuned, more to come in this exciting system! Fin.

jameststroud.bsky.social•75 days ago

So cool!!

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

Thanks James!

thomsanger.bsky.social•75 days ago

This is one of the coolest stories I've heard about in a long time! I am psyched to see you all get this out. It's badass.

agunderson.bsky.social•75 days ago

Thanks Thom!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply