Drinking water and food can contain a multitude of chemicals resulting from contamination of source/irrigation waters, chemical application or migrates from food packaging, resulting in animal and human exposure to complex mixtures of chemicals whose toxicity is often difficult to assess. Effect-based assays are well suited to quantify toxicity of such complex chemical mixtures, and allow the highly sensitive detection and identification of toxicants when coupled with high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) and high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS/MS) – both in native and extracted samples. The project will build on existing expertise, available via our project partners. Different combinations of bioassays and HPTLC are currently at different stages of development, and show great promise in detecting and identifying bioactive compounds. Our goal is to advance these methods for the detection of estrogenic and additional mechanisms of action (e.g. genotoxicity, neurotoxicity) and characterize substance profiles of a range of real-world samples.
