Environmental impacts of drugs against parasitic vector-borne diseases and the need to integrate sustainability into their development and use.

Background: The current scientific discourse on environmental impacts of veterinary medicines mostly focuses on ectoparasiticides. Meanwhile, the environmental impacts of widely prescribed drugs for the treatment of human and animal parasitic vector-borne diseases (PVBD) remain largely unexplored. There is thus a need for evidence-based information to support guidelines and protocols for sustainable One Health PVBD drug development and use, while promoting greener research practices.

EthoCRED: a framework to guide reporting and evaluation of the relevance and reliability of behavioural ecotoxicity studies.

Behavioural analysis has been attracting significant attention as a broad indicator of sub-lethal toxicity and has secured a place as an important subdiscipline in ecotoxicology. Among the most notable characteristics of behavioural research, compared to other established approaches in sub-lethal ecotoxicology (e.g.

Deciphering Host-Parasite Interplay in Infection through a One Health View of Proteomics Studies on Drug Resistance.

Recent efforts in the study of vector-borne parasitic diseases (VBPDs) have emphasized an increased consideration for preventing drug resistance and promoting the environmental safety of drugs, from the beginning of the drug discovery pipeline. The intensive use of the few available antileishmanial drugs has led to the spreading of hyper-resistant strains, resulting in a chronic burden of the disease. In the present work, we have investigated the biochemical mechanisms of resistance to antimonials, paromomycin, and miltefosine in three drug-resistant parasitic strains from human clinical isolates, using a whole-cell mass spectrometry proteomics approach.

One Health.

Bertram and colleagues introduce the One Health concept, an interdisciplinary framework that aims to sustainably advance and safeguard the health of humans, animals, and the environment.

Assessing Environmental Risks during the Drug Development Process for Parasitic Vector-Borne Diseases: A Critical Reflection.

Parasitic vector-borne diseases (VBDs) represent nearly 20% of the global burden of infectious diseases. Moreover, the spread of VBDs is enhanced by global travel, urbanization, and climate change. Treatment of VBDs faces challenges due to limitations of existing drugs, as the potential for side effects in nontarget species raises significant environmental concerns.

Fish predation affects invertebrate community structure of tropical temporary ponds, with downstream effects on phytoplankton that are obscured by pesticide pollution.

Aquatic biota of tropical temporary ponds typically experience a wide range of stressors that can drive the structure and dynamics of natural communities. Particularly in regions with intense agricultural activity, aquatic biota may not only experience predation pressure but also stress from pesticides that inadvertently enter the ponds. We increasingly understand how these different sources of stress affect classic model taxa under controlled laboratory conditions, but how predators and pesticides may jointly affect pond invertebrate communities is still unclear, particularly for tropical systems.

Time is of the essence: The importance of considering biological rhythms in an increasingly polluted world.

Biological rhythms have a crucial role in shaping the biology and ecology of organisms. Light pollution is known to disrupt these rhythms, and evidence is emerging that chemical pollutants can cause similar disruption. Conversely, biological rhythms can influence the effects and toxicity of chemicals.

Open science.

The term 'open science' refers to a range of methods, tools, platforms and practices that aim to make scientific research more accessible, transparent, reproducible and reliable. This includes, for example, sharing code, data and research materials, embracing new publishing formats such as registered reports and preprints, pursuing replication studies and reanalyses, optimising statistical approaches to improve evidence assessment and re-evaluating institutional incentives. The ongoing shift towards open science practices is partly due to mounting evidence that studies across disciplines suffer from biases, underpowered designs and irreproducible or non-replicable results.

Substrate colour guides turquoise killifish's (Nothobranchius furzeri) choice of preferred spawning habitat.

Turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) is a promising new model species used in biomedical and ecological laboratory experiments, and should be kept under optimal conditions to ensure fish welfare and the quality of science. While the popularity of this model species is rapidly increasing, we need to improve our understanding of how the species interacts with its environment to optimize its husbandry. Specifically, turquoise killifish are substrate spawners that bury their eggs in the sediment, which can be accommodated under captive conditions, but it is not yet known whether or not turquoise killifish have a preference for a specific sediment colour.

Long-term exposure to a pharmaceutical pollutant affects geotaxic behaviour in the adult but not juvenile life stage of killifish.

Ecosystems around the world are increasingly polluted with pharmaceutical compounds that may perturb wildlife behaviour. Because many pharmaceuticals are continuously present in the aquatic environment, animals are often exposed to them across several life stages or even their entire life. Despite a large body of literature showing various impacts of exposure to pharmaceuticals on fish, hardly any long-term studies across different life stages have been conducted which makes it hard to accurately estimate the ecological outcomes of pharmaceutical pollution.

Microalgae.

Microalgae, in the strictest definition, are eukaryotic, unicellular microorganisms that are photosynthetic and typically have an aquatic lifestyle. Despite the fact that cyanobacteria (or 'blue-green algae') are prokaryotic, and are therefore not true algae, we have included them in this overview because they have a similar physiology and ecology to eukaryotic microalgae, and share many biotechnological applications. In this Primer, we discuss the diversity of microalgae, their evolutionary origin and ecological importance, the role they have played in human affairs so far, and how they can help to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable society.

Combined effects of global warming and chlorpyrifos exposure on the annual fish Nothobranchius furzeri.

Global warming and environmental pollution threaten aquatic ecosystems. While interactive effects between both stressors can have more than additive consequences, these remain poorly studied for most taxa. Especially chronic exposure trials with vertebrates are scarce due to the high time- and monetary costs of such studies.

Pesticide sensitivity of Nothobranchius neumanni, a temporary pond predator with a non-generic life-history.

Pesticides are crucial to improve agricultural productivity, but often adversely affect surrounding aquatic systems and their fauna. To determine the environmental risk of pesticides, routine ecotoxicological tests are performed on several organisms, including standard fish models. However, these typically do not include fish species from variable habitats and with non-generic life-histories.

Neurochemical exposure disrupts sex-specific trade-offs between body length and behaviour in a freshwater crustacean.

Ongoing pollution of aquatic ecosystems with neurochemical compounds warrants an improved understanding of how this affects key organisms. Neurochemicals are shown to alter the behaviour of common study species but it remains difficult to translate these results to biologically meaningful predictions across taxa. This is partly because studies on species with non-generic life-history strategies such as many freshwater crustaceans are currently underrepresented.

Natural daily patterns in fish behaviour may confound results of ecotoxicological testing.

Low doses of neuroactive chemicals end up in the environment and disrupt behaviour of non-target organisms. Although a whole range of studies have documented pollutant-induced changes in behaviour, natural daily variability in behaviour is rarely taken into account. This is surprising because biological rhythms may affect the outcome of experiments, are adaptive and are expected to be sensitive to neurochemical exposure.

Towards improved fish tests in ecotoxicology - Efficient chronic and multi-generational testing with the killifish Nothobranchius furzeri.

As many freshwaters are chemically polluted, one of the challenges for policy makers is to determine the potential impact of these pollutants on ecosystems and to define safe concentrations. Common practice is the use of ecotoxicological assays to assess the response of model organisms from different trophic levels such as algae, invertebrates and fish during exposure to dilutions of a specific compound. Ideally, ecotoxicological assessments of (pseudo-)persistent chemicals should be performed across the life-cycle or even multiple generations for an accurate risk assessment.

Generation-specific and interactive effects of pesticide and antidepressant exposure in a fish model call for multi-stressor and multigenerational testing.

Ecological risks of a pollutant are typically assessed via short-term exposure of model organisms to that single compound. Such tests are informative, but cannot ascertain effects of long-term and multigenerational mixed-stressor exposure with which organisms are often confronted in their natural environment. Therefore, full life-cycle and multigenerational tests are needed.

Conspecific density and environmental complexity impact behaviour of turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri).

Fish models are essential for research in many biological and medical disciplines. With a typical lifespan of only 6 months, the Turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) was recently established as a time- and cost-efficient model to facilitate whole-life and multigenerational studies in several research fields, including behavioural ecotoxicology. Essential information on the behavioural norm and on how laboratory conditions affect behaviour, however, is deficient.

Antidepressant exposure reduces body size, increases fecundity and alters social behavior in the short-lived killifish Nothobranchius furzeri.

Social and mating behavior are fundamental fitness determinants in fish. Although fish are increasingly exposed to pharmaceutical compounds that may alter expression of such behavior, potential effects are understudied. Here, we examine the impact of lifelong exposure to two concentrations (0.

Population-, sex- and individual level divergence in life-history and activity patterns in an annual killifish.

Variation in life-history strategies along a slow-fast continuum is largely governed by life-history trade-offs. The pace-of-life syndrome hypothesis (POLS) expands on this idea and suggests coevolution of these traits with personality and physiology at different levels of biological organization. However, it remains unclear to what extent covariation at different levels aligns and if also behavioral patterns such as diurnal activity changes should be incorporated.

Interactive effects of 3,4-DCA and temperature on the annual killifish Nothobranchius furzeri.

Although aquatic organisms are increasingly exposed to pollutants and abnormally high temperatures as a consequence of climate change, interactive effects between those stressors remain poorly assessed. Especially in ectotherms, such as fish, increases in ambient temperature are expected to affect fitness-related traits and physiology. We used the turquoise killifish Nothobranchius furzeri to study the effects of a range of 3,4-dichloroaniline concentrations (0, 50, 100 μg/L) in combination with two temperature conditions (control and control +4 °C) during four months of exposure.

Improving the reliability and ecological validity of pharmaceutical risk assessment: Turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) as a model in behavioral ecotoxicology.

Pharmaceuticals are essential for human well-being, but their increasing and continuous use pollutes the environment. Although behavioral ecotoxicology is increasingly advocated to assess the effects of pharmaceutical pollution on wildlife and ecosystems, a consensus on the actual environmental risks is lacking for most compounds. The main limitation is the lack of standardized reproducible tests that are based on sensitive behavioral endpoints and that accommodate a high ecological relevance.

Individual behavioral variation reflects personality divergence in the upcoming model organism .

In the animal kingdom, behavioral variation among individuals has often been reported. However, stable among-individual differences along a behavioral continuum-reflective of personality variation-have only recently become a key target of research. While a vast body of descriptive literature exists on animal personality, hypothesis-driven quantitative studies are largely deficient.

Squeezing out the last egg-annual fish increase reproductive efforts in response to a predation threat.

Both constitutive and inducible antipredator strategies are ubiquitous in nature and serve to maximize fitness under a predation threat. Inducible strategies may be favored over constitutive defenses depending on their relative cost and benefit and temporal variability in predator presence. In African temporary ponds, annual killifish of the genus are variably exposed to predators, depending on whether larger fish invade their habitat from nearby rivers during floods.