Effects of polystyrene nanoplastics (PS-NPs) on physiological indexes and gene expression of soybean.

As a novel environmental pollutant, the impacts of nanoplastics on crops have attracted more and more attention. To explore the response of soybean to polystyrene nanoplastics (PS-NPs) at physiological and gene expression levels, this experiment used hydroponics to determine the phenotype and physiological indexes of soybean seedlings after exposure to 50 mg/L 100 nm PS-NPs for 10 days, and carried out transcriptome sequencing analysis of soybean seedling root system. The results showed that the growth of the soybean seedlings was inhibited, the root morphology changed significantly, the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) increased to a certain extent, the content of malondialdehyde (MDA) increased significantly, and the content of soluble sugar decreased after PS-NPs exposure. Transcriptome analysis showed that a total of 2112 differentially expressed genes were generated by PS-NPs exposure treatment, GO and KEGG analysis showed that they were mainly enriched in pathways related to redox reaction, reaction to ethylene and abscisic acid, amino acid metabolism and synthesis of other secondary metabolites. It was noted that 250 transcription factors were differentially expressed, mainly including the ERF, WRKY, NAC, bHLH and MYB transcription factor families. This experiment lays a foundation for further exploring the impact of nanoplastics on crops such as soybeans and its molecular mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]