One of the biggest challenges in ecological risk assessment is determining the impact of multiple stressors on individual organisms and populations in ‘real world’ scenarios. Emerging ‘omic technologies, notably, metabolomics, provides an opportunity to address the uncertainties surrounding ecological risk assessment of multiple stressors. The objective of this study was to use a metabolomics biomarker approach to investigate the effect of multiple stressors on amphibian metamorphs. To this end, metamorphs of Rana pipiens (northern leopard frogs) were exposed to the insecticide Carbaryl (0.32 μg/L), a conspecific predator alarm call (Lithobates catesbeianus), Carbaryl and the predator alarm call, and a control with no stressor. In addition to metabolomic fingerprinting, we measured corticosterone levels in each treatment to assess general stress response. We analyzed relative abundances of endogenous metabolites collected in liver tissue with gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. Support vector machine (SVM) methods with recursive feature elimination (RFE) were applied to rank the metabolomic profiles produced.
Results/Conclusions
SVM-RFE of the acquired metabolomic spectra demonstrated 85-96% classification accuracy among control and all treatment groups when using the top 75 ranked retention time bins. Biochemical fluxes observed in the groups exposed to carbaryl, predation threat, and the combined treatment include amino acids, sugar derivatives, and purine nucleotides. Biochemical pathways impacted include aminoacyl tRNA biosynthesis, nitrogen metabolism, and cyanoamino acid synthesis. Individual metabolite fluxes demonstrated 43% similarity among treatments. The extent of the overlap in endogenous metabolites impacted and pathway analysis suggests that pesticide and predation stressors act on similar modes of action.