Abstract
The use of marginal lands for growing food has increased worldwide. Many of these lands are supplemented with soil amendments to enhance their productivity, but they may also introduce contaminants depending on their origin. The use of sediments dredged from commercial waterways as a soil amendment has increased in recent years. However, there is significant concern regarding their potential to negatively affect public health by transferring contaminants, like metals, to the food supply. This study examined the behavior, microbiome and physiology of rats fed corn grown on dredged sediments with rats fed commercial feed corn and related those metrics to kernel metal content. Metal content did not differ between kernels grown on dredged sediments and feed corn for most metals except iron which was greater in commercial feed corn. Although there is some variability by animal response, animals fed corn grown on dredged sediments had a gut microbial community that generally promoted anxiety-like behavior while animals fed feed corn had a gut microbial community that promoted a more typical response. These findings suggest the effect of corn grown on dredged sediments on public health is complex and highlights the need for further investigation.
Acknowledgements
The research team would like to thank Sandra Kosek-Sills and Lynn Garrity at the Ohio Lake Erie Commission, who coordinated this project. Joe Cappel at the Toledo Port Authority provided access to the GLDMCI. We would also like to thank Wright State undergraduates Emily Kahlert, Lea Kelty, Sarah Krafcik, Mike McKean, and Taylor Ross helped with data collection in the field and laboratory and Bowling Green State University’s Animal Husbandry Technicians for daily care of experimental animals.
Funding
This research was financially supported by the Ohio Lake Erie Commission – Lake Erie Protection Fund (Grant No. SG 540–2019) to MAR and LMS and start-up funds and an internal grant from BGSU to LMS and JW.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Note
This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download DOCX )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rúa, M.A., Flanigan, K.A., Julian, A.N. et al. Corn grown on dredged sediments alters rat behavior in the elevated plus maze via the gut mycobiome.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-67211-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-67211-8
Keywords
- Metals
- Neurotoxicity
- Open field
- Soil amendment
Zea mays
Source: Ecology - nature.com
