Development of Alternative Methods to Assess the Toxicity and Bioaccumulation Potential of Chemicals in the Aquatic Environment

The toxicity and bioaccumulation potential of chemicals are properties that need to be assessed in risk assessment. In the context of the aquatic environment, both properties were traditionally evaluated in the whole fish. However, due to the reluctance to use a large number of animals for experimentation and high cost of in vivo testing, alternative techniques have been developed to assess these properties. This thesis describes three distinct investigations towards the development of alternative methods for predicting the toxicity and bioaccumulation potential of chemicals. The first study of this thesis is centred on the development of a list of reference compounds to evaluate non-animal methods to in vivo bioaccumulation studies in fish. The selection of representative chemicals was developed following a novel strategy built from previous criteria proposed for the validation of experimental tests and considering relevant aspects for the bioaccumulation of organic chemicals. A revision and a comparison of the most used alternative approaches to in vivo bioaccumulation studies were undertaken in this thesis. In particular, a variety of in vitro and in silico methods were explored and compared in terms of their reliability to predict the whole body biotransformation rate and bioconcentration factor of chemicals in fish. As a consequence of this investigation, an insight into the main challenges and future perspectives for each of the methods evaluated was conducted to provide a foundation for future research. The last research study is focused on the verification of the prediction of protein binding for cyclic compounds and the development of a decision tree strategy to prioritise chemicals for in vivo toxicity testing. The last two objectives were developed based on the integration of different alternative methods to assess the toxicity of chemicals. This thesis concludes with a summary and a discussion of the work undertaken and suggestions for future work.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Liverpool John Moores University

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Rodriguez-Sanchez, N

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cronin, Mark
• Madden, Judith
• Enoch, Steve

• QD Chemistry
• QH Natural history

DOI

10.24377/LJMU.t.00004510

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk:4510