Impact of Glyphosate Exposure on Glycogen Metabolic Enzymes in the Liver of Adult Male Rats

Background: Glyphosate is a broad spectrum herbicide and desiccant. Diabetes is a group of metabolic diseases resulting due to deficiency in insulin secretion. Chronic hyperglycemia will lead to long term damage and failure of different organs like eyes, kidneys, nerves etc. Liver is the major site for gluconeogenesis and a lot of glycolytic enzymes will be involved. Expression of Glycogen synthase and glycogen phosphorylase, the glycolytic enzymes are studied in this research.

Aim: To determine whether glyphosate exposure is detrimental to the glycogen metabolic enzymes (Glycogen synthase and phosphorylase) in the liver of adult male rats.

Materials and Methods: The following study was done on albino rats of wistar strain, and was approved by the institutional animal ethics committee. They were fed with a rat pellet diet. In our study the rats were divided into 4 groups with 6 rats in each and were subjected to glyphosate orally with different dosage in each group and mRNA expression analysis of glycogen related enzymes was done after a span of 16 weeks. The data were analyzed statistically by a one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Duncan’s multiple range test was used to see the statistical significance among the group. The results with p<0.05 level were considered to be statistically significant.

Results: The present result showed that the mRNA expression of glycogen synthase significantly reduced (P<0.05) and mRNA expression of glycogen phosphorylase activity increased significantly with an increased dose of glyphosate (P<0.05) to that of control.

Conclusion: Exposure to glyphosate causes detrimental changes in the glycolytic enzymes glycogen synthase and glycogen phosphorylase leading to diabetes.