Assessing the Toxicological Effects of Synthetic Musk Ketone Using the Caenorhabditis elegans Model

Using Sequencing-by-Synthesis (SBS) technology, the Illumina high-throughput sequencing platform sequenced the cDNA libraries, generating a large amount of raw data. After quality control of this raw data, the blank control group, the 2 mg/L ketomusk exposure group, and the 20 mg/L ketomusk exposure group yielded an average of 46,599,849, 45,667,817, and 55,288,099 clean reads, respectively. Across the nine samples, Q30 ≥ 94.88%, Q20 ≥ 98.31%, and GC content ranged from 46.3% to 46.83%. Transcriptomic sequencing was used to investigate the mechanism of ketomusk’s toxicity to Caenorhabditis elegans. The GO terms enriched among differentially expressed genes between the ketomusk-exposed group and the control group were primarily associated with the regulation of certain protein metabolic processes, cellular structure, phosphoprotein and phosphatase activity, protein serine/ threonine kinase activity, regulation of epithelial cell differentiation, centriole satellites, superoxide production, and NADPH oxidase activity. Enrichment analysis of KEGG pathways revealed that differentially expressed genes were primarily associated with sulfur metabolism, the biosynthesis of certain amino acids, fatty acid metabolism, nitrogen metabolism, and arginine biosynthesis.