University of North Carolina at Charlotte Awards
- Project Name: Predictive Toxicology of Organophosphates utilizing Drosophila embryonic stem cells and cell lines
Awarding Agency: Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Project Summary:
Traditional toxicity testing aims to determine whether a dose of a chemical results in a change in the health of a whole animal. In contrast HT tests examine whether and why which mechanism a chemical induces changes at the cellular and molecular level. A suite of assays are needed to test the large number of chemicals and to provide a matrix that will allow regulators to categorize the risk that these compounds might pose. In vitro assays allow a high throughput approach, are less time consuming, targeted cells and tissues can be identified, are less expensive, they allow for a broad range of doses and are amenable to quite a bit of genetic engineering.
Outcome:
To successfully develop the novel methods to asses the toxicity of the organophosphates, the project tested the Drosophilia cells and Drosphilia cell lines while including the trianing of students, installing the image analysis system to score the cultures, tested at least 100 organophosphates at a variety of doses and rank them
accordingly. An OP will be identified as a toxicant if it reduces the number of cholinergic neurons and it also results in the expression of the hsp70 protein which will be easily assessed at the same time. The project produced a manuscript for publication.
