A zebrafish-based system to study the impact of environmental factors in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)

Sammanfattning: Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a chronic disorder that affects millions of peopleworldwide. Although the etiology behind the disease is yet unknown, current theoriespropose a complex interplay between genetic susceptibility, exposure to environmentalfactors and exacerbated immune responses. While important efforts have been made to linkgenetics and environmental factors to IBD pathogenesis, a major challenge remains to assignthem a causative role. Particularly since most of the IBD-risk genetic polymorphisms arefound in non-coding regions (NCRs) with unknown regulatory activity, and for the lack ofknowledge about how environmental factors can modulate the function of these elements invivo . A main problem to address this challenge in IBD research is the lack of an appropriatemodel system in vivo that allows for high-throughput experiments with combinations ofdifferent IBD-risk factors, while keeping the in vivo context. In this work, we sought toovercome this issue by using a zebrafish reporter for a specific human IBD-risk NCR, inorder to investigate the modulation of this element by two groups of common environmentalfactors: pollutants, such as PolyFluoroAlkyl Substances (PFASs); and diet, by activation ofdietary sensors. We found that the activity of the WT-NCR in zebrafish larvae was increased in the presenceof PFAS, while the activation of the dietary sensor PPAR δ decreased the activity. These datalead us to suggest that the function of PFAS can be counteracted by PPARδ activation.Therefore, we propose zebrafish as a suitable in vivo model in which we can screen forpotentially harmful or beneficial effects of environmental factors in the activity of humannon-coding regions.