Office of Research and Development Publications

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Graphene family nanomaterials (GFNs) are widely used in the field of electronics and biomedicine. Gaps in our knowledge about fate and toxicity of GFNs, such as graphene oxide (GO), raise concerns regarding their environmental impacts. Filter feeding bivalves, such as Crassostrea...

A high level presentation for their senior people, lasting perhaps 45 minutes, covering a history of the protocol program, outcome focused… the why’s and how’s, and how you measure success.

Adult cardiac stem cells (CSC) and progenitor cells (CPC) represent a population of cells in the heart critical for its regeneration and function over a lifetime. The impact of chemicals on adult human CSC/CPC differentiation and function is unknown. Research was conducted to dev...

Increases in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (Bdnf), Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II alpha (Camk2a), and cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) response element binding (Creb1) gene expression have been associated with learning in a variety of different rodent studie...

Stress tests are used clinically to uncover underlying disease and predict future cardiovascular risk. Previously, we used treadmill exercise stress in rats to reveal latent effects of air pollution inhalation. Other daily stressors, when modeled experimentally, may have similar ...

Health Canada assesses the health risks posed by chemicals in commerce in Canada. An important endpoint in chemical assessment is genetic toxicity (e.g., ability to damage DNA) which is associated with cancer and inherited genetic diseases. The in vitro micronucleus (MN) assay is...

Arsenic is one of the most interesting and enigmatic elements of the periodic table. Its use as an intentional poison has been known for centuries and occasionally occurs today. Arsenic has been called the “King of Poisons”, because it had been used to poison royalt...

Exposure to mixtures is frequent, but biologic pathways such as metabolic inhibition, are poorly understood. CHCl3 and TCE are model volatiles frequently co-occurring; combined exposure results in less than additive hepatotoxicity. Here, we explore the underlying metabolic inte...

Background Air pollution risk assessments often employ effect coefficients from epidemiologic studies to quantify the public health impact of changes in air quality. Partly due to data and methodological limitations, epidemiologic studies have traditionally characterized the heal...

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework represents an ideal tool for integrating diverse data relating chemical exposures to adverse outcomes. Glucocorticoid signaling is tightly controlled and numerous adverse health outcomes have been associated with either elevation or sup...

From determining what to have for lunch to deciding where to invest our resources, we, as individuals and societies, are constantly involved in multi-criteria assessment. Using sustainability assessment as a case study, in this talk I will demonstrate the ubiquity of multi-crite...

Indicators of a stream’s ability to remove nutrients provide insights on watershed integrity and managers’ ability to restore ecosystem services based on specific characteristics of stream habitat. We used the Tracer Additon Spiraling Characterization Curve (TASCC) t...

This is the presentation for the invited lecture at Rutgers University. The lecture will be part of online course titled "Sustainability Decision Tools" in Spring 2018.

The deleterious effects of microplastic ingestion by marine organisms and the impacts across trophic levels are widely unknown. Due to the extensive ecological and socioeconomic benefits provided by coral reefs, investigating the impacts of microplastics on reef ecosystems is of ...

Application of in vitro based safety assessment requires reconciling chemical concentrations sufficient to produce bioactivity in vitro with those that trigger a molecular initiating event at the relevant in vivo target site. To address such need, computational tools such as phy...

The tides of acceptance of new alternative methods (NAMs) are changing. Numerous scientific papers have been published recently that explore the boundaries of data applicability and propose approaches that bridge new and conventional methods. The modernization of the Toxic Substa...

Although epidemiological, human and animal data have conclusively linked air pollution exposure to adverse cardiovascular outcomes, the severity of responses depends on a number of intrinsic (diet, underlying disease, etc) and extrinsic (e.g. co-stressors) factors. As such, cardi...

Wildland fires are increasingly linked to adverse health impacts related to poor air quality. For instance, short-term exposure to smoldering peat (SP) air pollution in eastern North Carolina during separate burns in 2008 and 2011 led to increased cardiopulmonary emergency room v...

Natural disasters often impose significant and long-lasting stress on financial, social and ecological systems. From Atlantic hurricanes to Midwest tornadoes to Western wildfires, no corner of the U.S. is immune to the threat of devastating climate events. Across the nation, ther...

Heart disease is increasing globally with a significant percentage of the increase being attributed to chemical and pollution exposures. Currently, no alternative or in vitro testing models exist to rapidly and accurately determine the cardiac effects of chemicals and/or pollutan...

Presentation detailing how NERL is advancing exposure science.

This research paper uses case analysis methods to understand why participants engage in this innovative approach public participation in scientific research, and what they hope that will mean for their community. The research questions that guide this analysis are: 1) what factor...

In 2007, the U.S. National Research Council laid out a vision and strategy for toxicity testing in the 21st century, which aspired to transform current testing approaches by making greater use of recent scientific advances in cell-based and computational methods. The adverse outc...

In 2016, an international multi-sector steering committee focusing on the development of a Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC) Pellston™ Workshop reached out to the membership of the Society of Toxicology, as well as other national and internatio...

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework has emerged to capitalise on the vast quantity of mechanistic data generated by alternative techniques (such as in vitro and in chemico), as well as advances in systems biology, cheminformatics, and bioinformatics. AOPs provide a scaffo...