Sulfur (S) serves many purposes in the ruminant animal. It is a component of amino acids methionine and cystine, as well as B-vitamins, biotin and thiamine and a number of other organic compounds. Elemental S, sulfates, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen sulfide all may be present in ruminant nutrition. Elemental S, sulfates, and sulfuric acid are relatively non-toxic. Hydrogen sulfide, however, is hi...

Marine organisms have been proven to be excellent sources of environmentally benign biogenic compounds. These metabolites have received much attention because of their pharmacological and antifouling activites. Biofouling process is known to cause serious problems to the submerged structures. Many countries have ratified an international treaty to ban the application of antifouling coatings bas...

Selenium is generally known as an antioxidant due to its presence in selenoproteins as selenocysteine, but it is also toxic. The toxic effects of selenium are, however, strictly concentration and chemical species dependent. One class of selenium compounds is a potent inhibitor of cell growth with remarkable tumor specificity. These redox active compounds are pro-oxidative and highly cytotoxic t...

The continuous accumulation of recalcitrant xenobiotic compounds into the ecosystem released from various sources caused a serious global concern. Xenobiotics compounds are carcinogenic, mutagenic, causing teratogenic effect and persist over a long period of time in the environment. Therefore there is an urgent need for the detoxification of these compounds. Biodegradation is a technique that e...

Prohibition of Ot (organotin) compounds was introduced in Japan in 1997 and worldwide from September 2008. This meant that the production of paints containing TBT compounds was stopped and alternatives to the available Ot antifoulants had to be developed. It has been claimed that the degradation by-products of these alternative antifoulants were less toxic than those of Ot compounds. Since the ...

Simultaneous exposure of humans to a number of chemicals may produce toxicity which is different than that seen if the exposure to these compounds were sequential. If there is more than one toxic compound in the mixture, their toxicity may be greater than additive, additive, or less than additive. Which of these alternatives occurs depends on a complex set of factors among which are the ability...

In support of the U.S. Tox21 program, we have developed a simple and chemically intuitive model we call weighted feature significance (WFS) to predict the toxicological activity of compounds, based on the statistical enrichment of structural features in toxic compounds. We trained and tested the model on the following: (1) data from quantitative high-throughput screening cytotoxicity and caspas...

Chlorodibenzo-p-dioxins, especially 2,3,7,8tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), are among the most toxic compounds known. These compounds are found as contaminants of technical chlorophenols and their derivatives. A variety of pathologic condition have been associated with the injestion of products containing chlorodibenzo-p-dioxins. Toxic fat, the cause of chick edema disease (1, 2) and a varie...

A strain of Stachybotrys atra isolated from a field case of stachybotryotoxicosis in Hungary was cultured in Hungary. All of the compounds toxic to brine shrimp were separated from the culture extract by solvent partition, column chromatography, and preparative thin-layer chromatography. Two of the toxic compounds were identified as verrucarin J and satratoxin H by comparison with pure standard...

The foraging ecology of mammalian herbivores is strongly shaped by plant secondary compounds (PSCs) that defend plants against herbivory. Conventional wisdom holds that gut microbes facilitate the ingestion of toxic plants; however, this notion lacks empirical evidence. We investigated the gut microbiota of desert woodrats (Neotoma lepida), some populations of which specialise on highly toxic c...