Nachwuchsforscheringruppe
Project: "Applying chemical activity concept to re-design chemical hazard assessment strategy for increased information output and reliability"
Project leader: Dr. Marta Markiewicz
Project team:
- M. Sc. Eunhye Bae M.Sc.
- Dipl.-Lebensmittelchem. Felix Irrgang
- M. Sc. Göksu Celik
Project duration: 36 month.
Supported by the Kurt Eberhard Bode-Foundation.
The amount of chemicals released into the environment grows at staggering pace impacting water quality, biodiversity and stability of ecosystems to an unforeseen extent. The assessment of associated hazard is a great challenge. Environmental data are available for only 7% of chemicals registered under REACH and only 26 % of them are reliable. This project aims to re-design current testing strategies to increase throughput and decrease susceptibility to experimental artefacts by maintaining constant stable exposure and using exclusively taxonomically lower organisms that show similar sensitivity but are easier to culture, reach equilibrium faster and are ethically more acceptable. Simultaneously the information output will be enhanced by employing chemical activity concept to provide not only indicators of toxicity/bioaccumulation but also information on modes of action, transformation products and (a)biotic partitioning. The environmental relevance of laboratory tests will be increased by incorporating natural organic matter as a carrier/sink of pollutants. Structure-activity relationships will be developed to indicate which elements of chemicals’ structure are responsible for partitioning or causing adverse effects and compounds that are particularly hazardous (e.g. show high toxicity or bioaccumulation) will be identified for a set of 60-70 chemicals representing different interaction potentials. In combination with environmental concentrations of these pollutants gathered from the literature/monitoring programs also improved risk assessment will be integrated into the project.