Effect-based methods including cell-based bioassays, reporter gene assays and whole-organism assays have been applied for decades in water quality monitoring and testing of enriched solid-phase extracts. There is no common EU-wide agreement on what level of bioassay response in water extracts is acceptable. At present, bioassay results are only benchmarked against each other but not against a consented measure of chemical water quality. The EU environmental quality standards (EQS) differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable surface water concentrations for individual chemicals but cannot capture the thousands of chemicals in water and their biological action as mixtures. We developed a method that reads across from existing EQS and includes additional mixture considerations with the goal that the derived effect-based trigger values (EBT) indicate acceptable risk for complex mixtures as they occur in surface water. Advantages and limitations of various approaches to read across from EQS are discussed and distilled to an algorithm that translates EQS into their corresponding bioanalytical equivalent concentrations (BEQ). The proposed EBT derivation method was applied to 48 in vitro bioassays with 32 of them having sufficient information to yield preliminary EBTs. To assess the practicability and robustness of the proposed approach, we compared the tentative EBTs with observed environmental effects. The proposed method only gives guidance on how to derive EBTs but does not propose final EBTs for implementation. The EBTs for some bioassays such as those for estrogenicity are already mature and could be implemented into regulation in the near future, while for others it will still take a few iterations until we can be confident of the power of the proposed EBTs to differentiate good from poor water quality with respect to chemical contamination.

Australian Rivers Institute School of Environment and Science Griffith University Southport QLD 4222 Australia; The University of Queensland Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences Brisbane QLD 4108 Australia

BDS BioDetection Systems B 5 Amsterdam The Netherlands

Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde Am Mainzer Tor 1 56068 Koblenz Germany

Department of Ecosystem Analysis Institute for Environmental Research RWTH Aachen University 52074 Aachen Germany

Institut für Energie und Umwelttechnik e 5 Bliersheimer Str 58 60 D 47229 Duisburg Germany

Institut National de l'Environnement Industriel et des Risques INERIS Unité d'Ecotoxicologie 60550 Verneuil en Halatte France

Laboratoire Watchfrog 1 Rue Pierre Fontaine 91 000 Evry France

Masaryk University Faculty of Science Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment Kamenice 753 5 62500 Brno Czech Republic

QuoData GmbH Prellerstr 14 01309 Dresden Germany

Swiss Centre for Applied Ecotoxicology Eawag EPFL Überlandstrasse 133 8600 Dübendorf Switzerland

UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research 04318 Leipzig Germany; Department of Ecosystem Analysis Institute for Environmental Research RWTH Aachen University 52074 Aachen Germany

UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research 04318 Leipzig Germany; Eberhard Karls University Tübingen Environmental Toxicology Centre for Applied Geosciences 72074 Tübingen Germany; Australian Rivers Institute School of Environment and Science Griffith University Southport QLD 4222 Australia; The University of Queensland Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences Brisbane QLD 4108 Australia

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Dept Environment and Health De Boelelaan 1108 1081 HZ Amsterdam The Netherlands

Waternet Institute for the Urban Water Cycle Department of Technology Research and Engineering Amsterdam The Netherlands

Citace poskytuje Crossref.org

Bioanalytical and chemical characterization of organic micropollutant mixtures in long-term exposed passive samplers from the Joint Danube Survey 4: Setting a baseline for water quality monitoring

Estrogenicity of chemical mixtures revealed by a panel of bioassays