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BIOCHEMICAL AND ANALYTICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF ESTROGENICALLY ACTIVE WASTEWATER: COMPARISON OF FIELD EXTRAPOLATIONS TO THE MEASURED CONCENTRATION OF ESTROGENS IN SEWAGE EFFLUENT
Citation:
Tilton, F., D. K. Schlenk, AND W H. Benson. BIOCHEMICAL AND ANALYTICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF ESTROGENICALLY ACTIVE WASTEWATER: COMPARISON OF FIELD EXTRAPOLATIONS TO THE MEASURED CONCENTRATION OF ESTROGENS IN SEWAGE EFFLUENT. SETAC 20th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, November 14-18, 1999.
Description:
Estrogenically active wastewater was observed at two municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) utilizing caged male channel catfish in a previous study. The focus of this investigation was to identify and characterize the compound(s) responsible for this estrogenic response. WWTP effluent was concentrated using C-18 and analyzed for estradiol in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Effluent concentrations ranged from no detection to 14 ng/L E2. Male channel catfish exposed in the laboratory to increasing aqueous concentrations (10 to 100,000 ng/L) of estradiol (E2) resulted in a dose dependent increase in the female specific phospholipoprotein, vitellogenin (Vtg). Vitellogenic responses observed in the field were extrapolated to this dose-response curve indicating that the caged catfish were exposed to the equivalent of 27 to 115 ng/L E2 in the WWTP effluents. From these data the estrogenic response observed in the field can not be attributed to E2 alone. It is likely the synthetic estrogen, ethinyl estradiol (EE), and the estradiol metabolite, estrone, measured in WWTPs in the U.K., Germany, and Canada are the compounds responsible for the difference. Both EE and estrone in an I.P. (1 mg/kg) study demonstrated similar Vtg induction, while their glucuronides show no induction. The differences between the biochemical and analytical characterization will be discussed.