RESEARCH ARTICLE Mechanisms of toxicity of triphenyltin chloride (TPTC) determined by a live cell reporter array Guanyong Su & Xiaowei Zhang & Jason C. Raine & Liqun Xing & Eric Higley & Markus Hecker & John P. Giesy & Hongxia Yu Received: 8 August 2012 / Accepted: 24 September 2012 / Published online: 6 November 2012 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 Abstract Triphenyltin chloride (TPTC), which has been ex- tensively used in industry and agriculture, can occur at con- centrations in the environment sufficient to be toxic. Here, potency of TPTC to modulate genes in a library containing 1,820 modified green fluorescent protein (GFP)-expressing promoter reporter vectors constructed from Escherichia coli K12 strains was determined. Exposure to TPTC resulted in 22 (fold change>2) or 71 (fold change>1.5) differentially expressed genes. The no observed transcriptional effect (NOTEC) and median transcriptional effect concentrations (TEC50) were determined to be 0.036 and 0.45 mg/L in E. coli. These responses were 1,230 and 97 times more sensitive than the acute median effect concentration (EC50) required to inhibit growth of cells, which demonstrated that this live cell array represents a sensitive method to assess toxic potency of chemicals. The 71 differentially expressed genes could be classified into seven functional groups. Of all the altered genes, three groups which encoded for catalytic enzymes, regulatory proteins, and structural proteins accounted for 28 %, 18 %, and 14 % of all altered genes, respectively. The pattern of differential expression observed during this study was used to elucidate the mechanism of toxicity of TPTC. To determine potential relationships among genes that were changed greater than 2.0-fold by exposure to TPTC, a corre- lation network analysis was constructed, and four genes were related to aroH, which is the primary target for metabolic regulation of aromatic biosynthesis by feedback inhibition in bacteria. The genes rnC, cld, and glgS were selected as po- tential biomarkers for TPTC, since their expression was more than 2.0-fold greater after exposure to TPTC. Keywords High throughput . NOTEC . Biomarker . Correlation network . Toxicity assessment . Bacterial . Genomics . Organotin Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11356-012-1280-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. G. Su : X. Zhang : L. Xing : J. P. Giesy : H. Yu State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse & School of the Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China G. Su : J. C. Raine : E. Higley : M. Hecker : J. P. Giesy Toxicology Centre, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5B3, Canada M. Hecker School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5B3, Canada J. P. Giesy Department of Biomedical Veterinary Sciences and Toxicology Centre, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5B3, Canada J. P. Giesy Department of Biology and Chemistry and State Key Laboratory in Marine Pollution, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China X. Zhang (*) : H. Yu (*) School of the Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210089, China e-mail: howard50003250@yahoo.com e-mail: yuhx@nju.edu.cn Environ Sci Pollut Res (2013) 20:803–811 DOI 10.1007/s11356-012-1280-7