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Environmental Fate and Risk Assessment of Emerging Pollutants

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A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Science and Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2023) | Viewed by 5924

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Bingli Lei

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Guest Editor

Institute of Environmental Pollution and Health, College of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Interests: PPCP; emerging environmental endocrine disruptors; bisphenol compounds; screening of typical environmental endocrine disruptors in water environment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid development of modern industry and agriculture, large quantities of emerging pollutants (EPs) are continually being discharged into the environment. EPs include many environmental contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products, detergents, polymers, etc., and currently few regulations are established for their environmental safety. Their occurrence is reported worldwide in different environmental media, such as water, soil and air. Environmental pollution by EPs is becoming a subject of global concern because these pollutants pose potential risks to environment and human health, and it is difficult to completely remove them from the environment, even using modern treatment technology. Therefore, EPs are becoming the focus of current research on environmental problems.

To prevent and control these emerging compounds well, we need to evaluate their occurrence, migration, transformation, and elimination in different environmental matrices. On the other hand, finding the source and transmission route of EPs is of great significance for environmental management in order to reduce the threat they pose to our urbanized society. Nevertheless, many emerging pollutants have been found; only few of them have been toxicologically evaluated, and some are very toxic to animal and human health. Hence, it is necessary to study the toxicity of more EPs to humans and organisms and associated molecular mechanisms. Additionally, the environmental risk due to the emerging contaminants is of great concern because most of them are considered to have potentially adverse impacts on animal life and human health. Environmental risk assessment is an important step before taking appropriate environmental management measures, which is mostly based on large volumes of toxicity data or robust epidemiologic surveys and exact exposure assessment.

Dr. Bingli Lei
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

emerging pollutants
environmental behavior
elimination
emission source
human exposure
toxicology
molecular mechanism
environmental risk assessment
environment management
control measures

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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10 pages, 1533 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Toxicity Rank Order (TRO) As a New Approach for Toxicity Prediction by QSAR Models

by Yuting Chen, Yuying Dong, Le Li, Jian Jiao, Sitong Liu and Xuejun Zou

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(1), 701; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010701 - 30 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1831

Abstract

Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationship (QSAR) models are commonly used for risk assessment of emerging contaminants. The objective of this study was to use a toxicity rank order (TRO) as an integrating parameter to improve the toxicity prediction by QSAR models. TRO for each contaminant was calculated from collected toxicity data including acute toxicity concentration and no observed effect concentration. TRO values associated with toxicity mechanisms were used to classify pollutants into three modes of action consisting of narcosis, transition and reactivity. The selection principle of parameters for QSAR models was established and verified. It showed a reasonable prediction of toxicities caused by organophosphates and benzene derivatives, especially. Compared with traditional procedures, incorporating TRO showed an improved correlation coefficient of QSAR models by approximately 10%. Our study indicated that the proposed procedure can be used for screening modeling parameter data and improve the toxicity prediction by QSAR models, and this could facilitate prediction and evaluation of environmental contaminant toxicity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Fate and Risk Assessment of Emerging Pollutants)

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12 pages, 1826 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bisphenol AF Promoted the Growth of Uterus and Activated Estrogen Signaling Related Targets in Various Tissues of Nude Mice with SK-BR-3 Xenograft Tumor

by Mengjie Yu, Qianqian Tang, Bingli Lei, Yingxin Yang and Lanbing Xu

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(23), 15743; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192315743 - 26 Nov 2022

Viewed by 1437

Abstract

Environmental estrogens can promote the growth, migration, and invasion of breast cancer. However, few studies evaluate adverse health impacts of environmental estrogens on other organs of breast cancer patients. Therefore, the present study investigated the effects of environmental estrogen bisphenol AF (BPAF) on the main organs of female Balb/cA nude mice with SK-BR-3 xenograft tumor by detecting the organ development and gene expression of targets associated with G protein-coupled estrogen receptor 1 (GPER1)-mediated phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/protein kinase B (PI3K/Akt) and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathways in hypothalamus, ovary, uterus, liver, and kidney. The results showed that BPAF at 20 mg/kg bw/day markedly increased the uterine weight and the uterine coefficient of nude mice compared to SK-BR-3 bearing tumor control, indicating that BPAF promoted the growth of uterus due to its estrogenic activity. Additionally, BPAF significantly up-regulated the mRNA relative expression of most targets related to nuclear estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) and GPER1-mediated signaling pathways in the hypothalamus, followed by the ovary and uterus, and the least in the liver and kidney, indicating that BPAF activated different estrogen activity related targets in different tissues. In addition, BPAF markedly up-regulated the mRNA expression of GPER1 in all tested tissues, and the molecular docking showed that BPAF could dock into GPER1. Because gene change is an early event of toxicity response, these findings suggested that BPAF might aggravate the condition of breast cancer patients through exerting its estrogenic activity via the GPER1 pathway in various organs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Fate and Risk Assessment of Emerging Pollutants)

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Review

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23 pages, 720 KiB

Open AccessReview

Immunotoxicity In Vitro Assays for Environmental Pollutants under Paradigm Shift in Toxicity Tests

by Xinge Wang, Na Li, Mei Ma, Yingnan Han and Kaifeng Rao

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(1), 273; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010273 - 24 Dec 2022

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1669

Abstract

With the outbreak of COVID-19, increasingly more attention has been paid to the effects of environmental factors on the immune system of organisms, because environmental pollutants may act in synergy with viruses by affecting the immunity of organisms. The immune system is a developing defense system formed by all metazoans in the course of struggling with various internal and external factors, whose damage may lead to increased susceptibility to pathogens and diseases. Due to a greater vulnerability of the immune system, immunotoxicity has the potential to be the early event of other toxic effects, and should be incorporated into environmental risk assessment. However, compared with other toxicity endpoints, e.g., genotoxicity, endocrine toxicity, or developmental toxicity, there are many challenges for the immunotoxicity test of environmental pollutants; this is due to the lack of detailed mechanisms of action and reliable assay methods. In addition, with the strong appeal for animal-free experiments, there has been a significant shift in the toxicity test paradigm, from traditional animal experiments to high-throughput in vitro assays that rely on cell lines. Therefore, there is an urgent need to build high-though put immunotoxicity test methods to screen massive environmental pollutants. This paper reviews the common methods of immunotoxicity assays, including assays for direct immunotoxicity and skin sensitization. Direct immunotoxicity mainly refers to immunosuppression, for which the assays mostly use mixed immune cells or isolated single cells from animals with obvious problems, such as high cost, complex experimental operation, strong variability and so on. Meanwhile, there have been no stable and standard cell lines targeting immune functions developed for high-throughput tests. Compared with direct immunotoxicity, skin sensitizer screening has developed relatively mature in vitro assay methods based on an adverse outcome pathway (AOP), which points out the way forward for the paradigm shift in toxicity tests. According to the experience of skin sensitizer screening, this paper proposes that we also should seek appropriate nodes and establish more complete AOPs for immunosuppression and other immune-mediated diseases. Then, effective in vitro immunotoxicity assay methods can be developed targeting key events, simultaneously coordinating the studies of the chemical immunotoxicity mechanism, and further promoting the paradigm shift in the immunotoxicity test. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Fate and Risk Assessment of Emerging Pollutants)

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