Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in municipal effluents directly affect the sexual development and reproductive success of fishes, but indirect effects on invertebrate prey or fish predators through reduced predation or prey availability, respectively, are unknown. At the Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario, Canada, a long-term, whole-lake experiment was conducted using a befor...

Studies in mammals have shown that exposure to estrogenic compounds can affect lipid metabolism and plasma concentrations of lipid-soluble vitamins. However, the potential for estrogenic contaminants to induce these effects in fish has not yet been examined. The ability of the estrogen analog ethynylestradiol (EE2) to alter concentrations of the lipid-soluble vitamins A and E in plasma, liver, ...

Sixteen steroids with different endocrine activities were administered to female rats for 6 or 7 days, in a broad range of doses. Liver growth was recorded by measuring weight and DNA contents and monooxygenase activity by assaying the turnover of five different substrates. According to their effects on these parameters steroids were assigned into one of the following three groups: (a) Estrogen...

Newly available prescription data has been used along with census data to develop a localised method for predicting pharmaceutical concentrations in sewage influent and effluent for England, and applied to a case study: the steroid estrogens estrone, 17β-estradiol, and 17α-ethinylestradiol in a selected catchment. The prescription data allows calculation of the mass consumed of synthetic estrog...

An analytical method based on on-line SPE-LC-APCI-MS/MS has been developed for the detection and quantification of eight selected estrogenic and progestagenic steroid hormones; estrone (E1), 17β-estradiol (E2), estriol (E3), 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE2), levonorgestrel (LEVO), medroxyprogesterone (MEDRO), norethindrone (NORE) and progesterone (PROG) in wastewater matrices. The injection volume co...

The gene, vitellogenin (vtg) was cloned and characterized in the dojo loach (Misgurnus anguillicaudatus), an indigenous freshwater species in East Asia, in order to develop tools for detecting the effects of estrogenic endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EEDCs). Full-length cDNAs encoding seven distinct vtg transcripts (vtg1-7) were obtained. The corresponding deduced amino acid sequences (Vtg1-7) ...

17α-Ethinyl estradiol (EE2), which is used worldwide in the treatment of some cancers and as a contraceptive, is often found in aquatic systems and is considered a pharmaceutically active compound (PhACs) in the environment. Current methods for the determination of this compound, such as chromatography, are expensive and lengthy and require large amounts of toxic organic solvents. In this work,...

We tested whether a concentration of unleaded gasoline (UG) vapor that was selectively hepatocarcinogenic in female mice in a chronic bioassay is antiestrogenic and whether liver tumor promotion by UG is secondary to antiestrogenicity. Twelve-day-old female C57BL/6 x C3H F1 mice (hereafter called B6C3F1) received i.p. injections of N-nitrosodiethylamine (5 mg/kg) or vehicle. Beginning at 5-7 we...

Background: The transgenic approach using estrogen-responsive regulator in fish has been given much attention as a potential means to detect and/or address estrogen-related aquatic pollutions. In order to address the development stageand reproduction status-dependent expression patterns of the chgH-rfp transgene (red fluorescent protein transgene driven by choriogenin H promoter) in marine meda...