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Practical application of new approach methods to enhance the understanding of chemical effects on pollinators
Citation:
LaLone, C. Practical application of new approach methods to enhance the understanding of chemical effects on pollinators. American Chemical Society Virtual Meeting, Duluth, MN, August 22 - 26, 2021. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.16438275
Impact/Purpose:
Pollinators, such as bees, provide an essential function in the environment fertilizing plants including food crops relied upon for livestock and human consumption. Globally, populations of pollinators have been declining. It is recognized that multiple stressors are leading to these noted declines. A contributing factor to population decline are pesticides. Chemical safety for pollinators, like bees, has typically been evaluated with short term laboratory and field toxicity studies, however new approaches for more efficient and less costly high-throughput and computational methods that can inform chemical safety are being developed that may be useful for understanding pollinator health and informing regulatory toxicology. This presentation will describe these new approaches, their status in development, and their possible application to chemical safety centered around pollinators.
Description:
Pollinators, such as bees, provide an essential function in the environment fertilizing plants including food crops relied upon for livestock and human consumption. Due to an increased awareness of declining pollinator health, there are global efforts to protect pollinators from adverse effects that can be controlled through human intervention. It is recognized that the declining health of certain pollinators, such as honey bees, is due to multiple stressors including poor nutrition and management practices, pests and pathogens, lack of genetic diversity, and pesticide exposure. Relative to chemical risk assessment, traditional laboratory testing typically evaluates acute toxicity on worker bees. Although more chronic and subchronic testing is also used to look at endpoints such as viability, foraging, egg laying, memory, and behavior. Field testing also provide valuable information to inform chemical safety, however, are costly and time consuming. New approach methods (NAMs), which take advantage of existing toxicity knowledge, high-throughput cell-based or transcriptomic technologies, and advanced computational methods are being developed and studied for use in regulatory toxicology. Primarily NAMs research and development has been driven by a need for animal alternatives as regulatory entities are promoting non-animal testing agendas. However, NAMs could have valuable applications for many decision-making scenarios, including the protection of pollinators. For example, the adverse outcome pathway (AOPs) framework has been used to capture exiting knowledge to understand causal linkages from chemical and non-chemical stressors leading to bee colony death, both to identify knowledge gaps for research and inform decision-making. Bioinformatic approaches such as the US EPA Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility tool has been used to evaluate pathway conservation focusing on key AOPs relevant to pollinator health to extrapolate knowledge from Apis to non-apis bee species. Also, high-throughput transcriptomic methods are being developed for invertebrate species to understand the value of transcriptional point of departure (POD) estimates as protective values in comparison to traditional empirically derived PODs to inform risk assessment. These NAMS provide unique information to inform pollinator health and are becoming more prominent as viable tools for decision-making, particularly where efficiencies and cost-reduction are needed.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Practical application of new approach methods to enhance the understanding of chemical effects on pollinators
LALONE_NAMS FOR POLLINATORS.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 5146.192 KB, about PDF)