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Paving the Way for Predictive Ecotoxicology in the 21st Century
Citation:
GARCIA-REYERO, N. AND D. L. VILLENEUVE. Paving the Way for Predictive Ecotoxicology in the 21st Century. Presented at 30th Annual Meeting of SETAC North America, New Orleans, LA, November 19 - 23, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation provides an introduction to a SETAC Pellston Workshop that was held in April 2009 for the purpose of paving the way for greater use of alternative endpoints (e.g., quantitative structure activity relationships, biomarkers, in vitro bioassay) to inform ecological decision-making.
Description:
The ability to conduct traditional whole organism toxicity tests for increasingly wide inventories of chemicals of concern is limited by the resource-intensity of the approach in terms of cost, person-hours, and animal use. In a 2007 report, a National Research Council Committee on Toxicity Testing and Assessment of Environmental Agents concluded that a paradigm shift in the way toxicity testing, related to human health risk assessment and regulation, is conducted was needed. In brief, the committee advocated replacing whole animal toxicity testing with batteries of in vitro, mechanism-based, bioassays as the key empirical source of toxicity data and developing appropriate predictive tools to make scientifically-credible use of those in vitro data as a basis for risk assessment. While a similar solution may not be viable for ecotoxicology, the field faces a similar need to harness all available data, including molecular and biochemical responses measured in in vitro or simplified in vivo assays to support ecological risk assessment and regulation. This presentation provides an introduction to a SETAC Pellston Workshop that was held in April 2009 for the purpose of paving the way for greater use of alternative endpoints (e.g., quantitative structure activity relationships, biomarkers, in vitro bioassay) to inform ecological decision-making. It describes an overall strategy for making greater use of these data. The strategy starts with either organizing information from the extant literature or reverse engineering stressor-response pathways from toxicogenomic data to identify key molecular and biochemical nodes of perturbation (i.e., toxicity pathways). However, just as critically, it considers how those initial perturbations cascade, across biological levels or organization, to produce adverse outcomes that are meaningful in an ecological risk context (described as adverse outcome pathways). Because, in the case of ecotoxicology, those are typically outcomes at the level of population sustainability, approaches for translating molecular and biochemical data into parameters relevant for population modeling are considered. Additionally, other predictive tools such as quantitative approaches for species extrapolation and understanding dose/duration-response relationships need to be developed and employed. Elements of the generalized strategy described in this presentation will be considered in detail, and illustrated through case studies, in the subsequent talks within this special symposium.