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What is the relationship of behavioral endpoints to traditional acute, growth and reproduction endpoints for several inorganic and pharmaceutical chemicals using ECOTOX.
Citation:
van den Berg, S., Jim Lazorchak, AND Joel Allen. What is the relationship of behavioral endpoints to traditional acute, growth and reproduction endpoints for several inorganic and pharmaceutical chemicals using ECOTOX. 2021 SETAC Europe Virtual Meeting, Virtual, May 03 - 06, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation is an outcome of a workshop the EPA authors attended in 2019 discussing the use of behavioral endpoints in regulatory programs. It is an exercise to see if EPA's ECOTOX database can be used to assess the sensitivity of behavior endpoints with apical endpoints reported in the literature
Description:
Behavioral responses are an important endpoint in ecotoxicology due to the link they provide between effects found at a cellular level to impacts on the fitness of an individual. However, what has so far remained unclear is how behavioral endpoints relate to more traditional endpoints, like mortality, growth and reproduction. We perform a meta-analysis of the ECOTOXicology knowledgebase (ECOTOX), which is a comprehensive, publicly available knowledgebase providing single chemical environmental toxicity data on aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. Our meta-analysis reveals that at a broad level behavioral endpoints are not always the most sensitive endpoint for each taxa-chemical combination. To get a better insight on whether experimental and or research-quality parameters can help explain this unexpected result, we subsequently performed a more in-depth analysis of the data focusing on standard test species such as Daphnia magna, Hyalella azteca, and Danio rerio. We compared the behavioral endpoints of such commonly tested species with standard endpoints for the following chemicals: copper, zinc, cadmium and lead (heavy metals), ethynylestradiol (an estrogen), trenbolone (an androgen), fluoxetine, atenolol (both neurotransmitter modulators), sulfamethoxazole (an antibacterial), hydrochlorothiazide (anti-hypertensive), ibuprofen (anti-inflammatory), and gemfibrozil (lipid modifier). We compared the LD 50s, LC50s, IC10s and NOECs for both Behavioral endpoints and standard tests. The combination of both broad-level as well as an in-depth analysis of the ECOTOX database allows us to create a clear picture of why behavioral data is currently not used in risk assessment, and how we can make behavioral data acceptable for future regulatory use.
