Prenatal Arsenic Exposure and Offspring Anxiety

Pregnant C3H/HeN mice (F0, total n = 14) were purchased from JAPAN SLC (Shizuoka, Japan) and these mice (n = 7) were given arsenic exposure (sodium arsenite, NaAsO2, 85 ppm (85 mg/L)) in the drinking water starting from the gestational day (GD) 8 to 18. Control mice (n = 7) were given tap water only. The experimental dose for gestational arsenic exposure was explained in our previous studies [33 (link), 34 (link), 38 ]. The experimental design of this study was illustrated in the Fig. 1. F1 female offspring (n = 12 per each group) delivered from arsenic exposed F0 or control F0 were randomly collected for the experiments. At the age of 74-week, the control female mice (n = 7) and arsenic-exposed female mice (n = 7) were used for anxiety-related behavioral test and molecular analyses. Then, the control F1 female mice (n = 5) and arsenite F1 female mice (n = 5) were used for immunohistochemical analyses. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Animal Care and Experimentation Council of the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan (Ethics approval code number: AE-22-12).