State of Research: Biological Pathways and Food-Chain Transfer

摘要

Data on the chemistry of biologically active components of petroleum, synthetic fuel oils, certain metal elements and pesticides provides valuable generic information needed for predicting the long-term fate of buried-waste constituents and their liklihood of entering food chains. Components of such complex mixtures partition between solid and solution phases, influencing their mobility, volatility, and susceptibility to microbial transformation. For PAH's and their hetero cycles, metabolites must be considered as potentially greater concerns than the parent compounds. Activity like mutagenicity of specific PAH's may also be blocked in the presence of complex mixtures. Recently, chemo-directed bioassays of synthetic-fuel oils have identified several new compound classes which are potent mutagens. Within food chains compound classes differ markedly in soil persistence, metabolizability, and tissue retention following depuration. Magnitude of these processes may contribute more to the outcome of organism exposure than compound toxicity based on simple bioassays. (ERA citation 08:039446)