Sophie Emberley-Korkmaz est étudiante à la maîtrise à l’Université McGill sous la supervision de Niladri Basu. Sophie travaille sur le projet suivant :
Cytotoxic effects of pesticides exposed to the RTgill-W1 cell line as an alternative approach for acute toxicity testing
Résumé du projet de recherche :
Ethical concerns and increasing demands for chemical testing has called for the need to explore New Approach Methods (NAMs) to reduce animal testing and address resource limitation issues. The rainbow trout gill cell line (RTgill-W1) was recently standardized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to assess the cytotoxicity of chemicals. However, more information is needed on how results from this in vitro test compare with the whole organism. The main objective of this study was to use OECD Test No. 249 to characterize the cytotoxicity of 19 pesticides considered important to Canadian ecosystems, and to compare these in vitro data with lethal concentration 50 (LC50) results from whole animal studies. Cytotoxicity results from fluorescent dyes assessing cell viability found 11 of them 19 chemicals to be cytotoxic with LC50s ranging between 26 – 500 µM. There was a significant concordance between in vitro values and in vivo values from 96-hour rainbow trout fish experiments. However, results indicate that the RTgill-W1 cells likely do not carry the diverse range of target sites required to elicit cytotoxicity for all pesticides. This research demonstrates the potential for alternatives to animal testing strategies, but more research is required.