The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development both recommend cucumber, lettuce, radish, red clover and wheat as plant species for terrestrial toxicity tests. In Illinois, millet is common in the Illinois River Valley and toxicity testing using this plant species has been reported previously. The objective of this study was to compare the toxicities of several phenolic compounds to cucumber, lettuce and millet seeds concurrently. Phenol, 2‐chlorophenol, 2,4‐dichlorophenol and 2,4,6‐trichlorophenol were tested.
Millet seeds were shown to be superior over cucumber and lettuce seeds; they exhibited regular and predictable toxic responses to all four compounds. Millet seeds, in addition, were the most sensitive. Excellent results were obtained for the structure‐toxicity relationships between millet EC50s and the molecular weights of the phenols (R = 0.999), and between millet EC50s and n‐octanol/water partition coefficients (R = 0.999). It is recommended, consequently, that millet be included in level 1 biological tests.
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