Environmental hazard of yperite released at sea: sublethal toxic effects on fish

Torre, Camilla Della; Petochi, T.; Farchi, C.; Corsi, Ilaria; Dinardo, Maria Maddalena; Sammarini, V.; Alcaro, Luigi; Mechelli, Luca; Focardi, Silvano; Tursi, Angelo; Marino, G.; Amato, Ezio

doi:10.1016/j.jhazmat.2013.01.003

Cited by 24 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 58 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Where water mixing rates are low, concentrations of dissolved MC at the solid surface or within breached munitions can increase to levels that approach solubility limits. Given that underwater munitions can effectively act as bottom structure and habitat 9,10 , marine organisms around the munitions may be exposed to concentrations many orders of magnitude higher than present in the bulk water column.…”

Section: Comparison With Previous Studies and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Situ Measurements of Explosive Compound Dissolution Fluxes from Exposed Munition Material in the Baltic Sea

Beck

Lee

Eggert

et al. 2019

Environ. Sci. Technol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Underwater munitions containing millions of tons of toxic explosives are present worldwide in coastal marine waters as a result of unexploded ordnance and intentional dumping. Dissolution flux of solid explosives following corrosion of metal munition housings controls exposure of biological receptors to toxic munition compounds (MC; including TNT: 2,4,6-Trinitrotoluene, RDX: 1,3,5-Trinitro-1,3,5-triazinane, and DNB: 1,3-Dinitrobenzene). Very little is known about the dissolution behavior of MC in the marine environment. In this work, we exploit a unique marine study site in the Baltic Sea with exposed solid explosives to quantify in situ MC dissolution fluxes using dissolved MC gradients near the exposed explosive surface, as well as benthic chamber incubations. The gradient method gave dissolution fluxes that ranged between 0.001 and 3.2, 0.0001 and 0.04, and 0.003 and 1.7 mg cm -2 d -1 for TNT, RDX, and DNB, respectively. Benthic chamber incubations indicated dissolution fluxes of 0.0047-0.277, 0-0.11, and 0.00047-1.45 mg cm -2 d -1 for TNT, RDX, and DNB, respectively. In situ dissolution fluxes estimated in the current study were lower than most dissolution rates reported for laboratory experiments, but clearly demonstrated that MC are released from underwater munitions to the water column in the Baltic Sea.

show abstract

Section: Comparison With Previous Studies and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Situ Measurements of Explosive Compound Dissolution Fluxes from Exposed Munition Material in the Baltic Sea

Beck

Lee

Eggert

et al. 2019

Environ. Sci. Technol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Gills are potentially in permanent contact with waterborne contaminants, which confers particular interest to this organ for genotoxicity assessment. For instance, Della Torre et al (72) found elevated DNA strand breakage in the gills (but not liver, kidney, muscle or intestine) of conger eel collected from a chemical weapon dumping site at sea presumably contaminated by yperite (unquantified), which was interestingly, linked to increased histological lesions in the skin. In a more unusual approach, cryopreserved fish sperm has also been selected as target for the comet assay, albeit with moderate results (52,53).…”

Section: Fish and Other Vertebratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing social media’s impact on local communities

Bingham-Hall¹,

Tidey

2016

Visual Communication

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Determining the genotoxic effects of pollutants has long been a priority in Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) for coastal ecosystems, especially of complex areas such as estuaries and other confined waterbodies. The acknowledged link between DNA damage, mutagenicity and carcinogenicity to the exposure to certain toxicants has been responsible to the growing interest in determining the genotoxic effects of xenobiotics to wildlife as a measure of environmental risk. The comet assay, although widely employed in in vivo and in vitro toxicology, still holds many constraints in ERA, in large part owing to difficulties in obtaining conclusive cause-effect relationships from complex environments. Nevertheless, these challenges do not hinder the attempts to apply the alkaline comet assay on sentinel organisms, wild or subjected to bioassays in or ex situ (from fish to molluscs) as well to standardise protocols and establish general guidelines to the interpretation of findings. Fish have been regarded as an appealing subject due to the ease of performing the comet assay in whole blood. However, the application of the comet assay is becoming increasingly common in invertebrates (e.g. in molluscan haemocytes and solid tissues such as gills). Virtually all sorts of results have been obtained from the application of the comet assay in ERA (null, positive and inconclusive). However, it has become clear that interpreting DNA damage data from wild organisms is particularly challenging due to their ability to adapt to continuous environmental stressors, including toxicants. Also, the comet assay in non-model organisms for the purpose of ERA implies different constraints, assumptions and interpretation of findings, compared with the in vitro procedures from which most guidelines have been derived. This paper critically reviews the application of the comet assay in ERA, focusing on target organisms and tissues; protocol developments, case studies plus data handling and interpretation. and the 32 P-postlabelling method for DNA-carcinogen adducts, most of which have been in use for decades. However, when Singh et al. (1) first published the protocol of the alkaline Single-Cell Gel Electrophoresis (SCGE), or 'comet' assay, as it is most commonly known, from the original 'neutral' variant developed by Östling and Johanson (2), few could have predicted the fast and widespread employment of this technique within the field of environmental toxicology. Besides the method's practicality and cost-effectiveness, the by guest on June 30, 2016 http://mutage.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from Manerikar et al. (8), Ahmed et al. (9) TCDD 001746-01-6 1 E.andrei Sforzini et al. (7)The references provided concern illustrative in vivo case studies with ecologically relevant organisms subjected to laboratorial toxicity-testing bioassays that employed the comet assay to determine genotoxic effects. IARC classification of toxicants: 1) carcinogenic to humans; 3) not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.

show abstract