In a two-species toxicity test system survival and reproduction of both the predator Hypoaspis aculeifer (Gamasida) and the prey Folsomia fimetaria (Collembola) were studied after 21 days of residual exposure to a soil contamination of the insecticide dimethoate. Additional experiments were run to analyze which species-species and compound-species relationships determine the outcome of this two...

More than 100,000 commercially used chemical compounds are currently registered in the European Union [1]. Under the new EU REACH legislation (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisa‐ tion of Chemicals [2]), which came into effect in June 2007, existing chemicals and all new substances, starting materials and intermediates exceeding an annual production volume of 1 tonne have to be tested for to...

Most of the statistical techniques used to evaluate the data obtained from toxicity studies are based on the assumption that the data show a normal distribution and homogeneity of variance. Literature review on toxicity studies on laboratory animals reveals that in most of the cases homogeneity of variance alone is examined for the data obtained from these studies. But the data that show homoge...

Sediment toxicity tests are valuable tools for assessing the potential effects of contaminated sediments in dredged material evaluations because they inherently address complexity (e.g., unknown contaminants, mixtures, bioavailability). Although there is a need to understand the chronic and sublethal impacts of contaminants, it is common to conduct only short-term lethality tests in evaluations...

The number of chemicals in commerce which have not been evaluated for potential developmental toxicity is large. Because of the time and expense required by conventional developmental toxicity tests, an abbreviated assay is needed that will preliminarily evaluate otherwise untested chemicals to help prioritize them for conventional testing. A proposed short-term in vivo assay has been used in a...

In chemical regulation, e.g. the EU Water Framework Directive, REACH, or the Pesticide Directive, standardized ecotoxicological tests are applied to evaluate and rank the hazard of compounds and for deriving environmental quality standards (EQS). Standardized test methods prescribe fixed testing conditions e.g. specific temperature, pH, light intensity etc. However, environmental conditions und...

OBJECTIVE To study the acute toxicity of C25P polypeptide, a CCR5 antagonist, in mice and its carcinogenic effect in vitro. METHODS The acute toxicity of C25P polypeptide in mice was assessed by determining the maximum tolerated dose (MTD). The mice were given C25P at the dose of 3.64 g/kg by tail vein injection, and the control mice received saline (40 ml/kg) injection. The mice were continu...

Increased use of whole effluent toxicity (WET) tests in the regulatory arena has brought increased concern over the statistical analysis of WET test data and the determination of toxicity. One concern is the issue of statistical power. A number of WET tests may pass the current hypothesis test approach because they lack statistical power to detect relevant toxic effects because of large within-...