Pentachlorophenol (PCP) is frequently detected in the aquatic environment and has been implicated as an endocrine disruptor in fish. In the present study, 4-month-old zebrafish (Danio rerio) were exposed to 1 of 4 concentrations of PCP (0.1, 1, 9, and 27 µg/L) for 70 d. The effects of PCP exposure on plasma thyroid hormone levels, and the expression levels of selected genes, were measured in the brain and liver. The PCP exposure at 27 µg/L resulted in elevated plasma thyroxine concentrations in male and female zebrafish and depressed 3, 5, 3'-triiodothyronine concentrations in males only. In both sexes, PCP exposure resulted in decreased messenger RNA (mRNA) expression levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone β-subunit (tshβ) and thyroid hormone receptor β (trβ) in the brain, as well as increased liver levels of uridine diphosphoglucuronosyl transferase (ugt1ab) and decreased deiodinase 1 (dio1). The authors also identified several sex-specific effects of PCP exposure, including changes in mRNA levels for deiodinase 2 (dio2), cytosolic sulfotransferase (sult1 st5), and transthyretin (ttr) genes in the liver. Environmental PCP exposure also caused an increased malformation rate in offspring that received maternal exposure to PCP. The present study demonstrates that chronic exposure to environmental levels of PCP alters plasma thyroid hormone levels, as well as the expression of genes associated with thyroid hormone signaling and metabolism in the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis and liver, resulting in abnormal zebrafish development.
Water-borne typhus, dysentery, viral hepatitis, diarrhoea, and other intestinal infectious diseases are the prevailing diseases in the rural areas in China. The harvested rainwater is easily contaminated by air pollution, surface runoff fertilizer and pesticides, solid waste and chips at the rainwater-harvesting surface (rubbish, animal faeces, etc.), and anthropogenic pollution. With the development of technology, products made of ceramic filters have been widely used in cities where tapwater is available. However, as a drawback, ceramic filters do not apply to those rural singlehousehold families without access to water pressure. In addition, the filter has a certain service life, and it has to be frequently replaced if water quality is poor, which will burden water users with unbearable costs.
The formation and development of pseudospark discharge, especially the onset of the breakdown, are of great technological interests in multiple applications due to their influences on the limits of current rising and fast switching performances of the devices. In this work, the development of pseudospark discharge in the pre-discharge and hollow cathode phases in a single-gap device are investigated by a time-dependent model to calculate the temporal development of total ionization cross section in varying times and regions. The simulations in our work are performed using the two-dimensional kinetic plasma simulation code XOOPIC. The time-dependent evolutions of the ionization cross section in pre-discharge and hollow cathode phases are presented under varying electric fields and hollow cathode configurations. Thus the electron multiplications and plasma generation processes by ionizing collisions in varying phases are examined and their dependences on a variety of external parameters are determined in different regions in the pseudospark device. A sequence of physical events and their influences in different regions are also identified via the quantitative analysis of time-dependent ionization cross section. The discharge formation time shows highest dependences on the cathode aperture diameters and anode voltages. Additionally, a linear dependence of the pseudospark breakdown time on the time-averaged ionization cross section is illustrated under varying external parameters. It indicates that the influences of the external parameters on the discharge performances can be determined and estimated via the total and average ionization cross sections under varying external conditions. In this work, both a qualitative understanding of the pseudospark onset mechanism and a quantitative approach to estimate the formation time in a pseudospark device with varying parameters are developed via this model.
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