Projects

Effect-Net is a multi- and transdisciplinary project that intends to generate a toolbox for multi-scale chemical effects as a basis for a holistic effect-based risk evaluation, and for sociocultural governance aiming at personal and political responsibility as well as a reduction of emissions of hazardous chemicals into aquatic environments. The focus is on the development of a multi-scale network for the identification and evaluation of the biological hazards posed by emerging high-consumption
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WP 1 first aims at identifying and quantifying relevant test substances from the groups of pharma-ceuticals (antidiabetics and neuroactive drugs such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and food additives (artificial sweeteners) in surface waters partly using existing expertise. The focus is on substances of high consumption and environmental relevance. Based on this analysis, the final test compounds will be defined (e.g. metformin, fluoxetine and sucralose), and specific methods for
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WP 2 will address metabolites and transformation products (TPs) of compounds selected in WP 1. These will be generated and identified by means of electrochemical synthesis mimicking mainly Phase I metabolism and mass spectrometric detection. The mixture of metabolites and TPs will be used for ligand screening with nuclear receptors (WP 3) using the analytical methodology devel-oped as well as for further toxicity screening for effects on cells (WP 4) and in biota (WPs 5 and 6).

This WP will provide data for receptor binding of the tested xenobiotics at a molecular level in cell-free systems, since in most cases the binding of a compound to a receptor molecule implicates a biological effect, either agonistic or antagonistic. However, since biological approaches are not ca-pable of identifying the chemical structures of environmental contaminants, feasible combinations of bioassays and chemical analysis will be developed and tested. As a pretreatment step concepts of an
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In contrast to WP 5, which addresses in vivo effects in early developmental stages of zebrafish as an established model organism in ecotoxicology, WP 6 will use one indigenous fish species and one species representative of invertebrates in order to verify and, thus, validate the data obtained with zebrafish and also those generated at the in vitro levels (WPs 3 and 4) with respect to their ecologi-cal relevance. Possible adverse effects of the test substances identified in WP 1 will be assessed
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Given that the ultimate goal of ecotoxicology is the identification of effects at the population and ecosystem levels, microbial communities were picked for reasons of their supreme importance in the environment. Two microbial communities (intestinal microbiomes and environmental microbial biofilms) will be investigated with respect to effects by the test substances (cf. WPs 1 and 2). The intestinal biofilm population shifts may be responsible for the health status of the aquatic organisms, whereas
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Results of the multi-level scale approach on effects for the selected micropollutants and their TPs and metabolites will be evaluated and integrated as a base for the creation of a tool box for the ef-fect-based risk assessment. Results will stimulate further work in the development of models linking exposure and effect data with hydrological models. This will require the correlation of results from receptor assays, cell lines and animal models. Microbial data will be linked to the health status
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All data from chemical and biological analyses will be used as sources of data for WP 9. It is not the purpose of Eff-Net to provide a tool to fully model the effects of carbohydrate metabolism-related and neurotoxic substances. Rather, in the sense of an Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP [33]), the data pool will be analyzed for the suitability of lower scale data (e.g. receptor assay data) to predict the adverse outcome of the test substances at higher levels of organization (e.g. fish). In addition,
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