This two-part seminar will feature Dr. Michael Denison of the University of California Davis Superfund Research Program (SRP) and Dr. Scott Boitano from the University of Arizona SRP, and will focus on applications of cell-based bioanalytical methods to better understand environmental toxicities.
The ability of toxic chemicals, such as dioxin-like chemicals and endocrine disruptors, to modulate intracellular receptor-mediated signal transduction is one way that diverse toxicants can produce common responses. In the laboratory, these cellular mechanisms can be taken advantage of and used to develop screening methods to better detect and quantitate such chemicals in a variety of sources to which people may be exposed. Dr. Denison will describe the development, validation, and screening applications of Chemically-Activated LUciferase eXpression (CALUX) cell bioassays.
Diseases associated with the airway often contain living cells with compromised cellular physiology. Thus, traditional cellular toxicity assays that measure cell death as a single toxicity endpoint may miss the more subtle sub-cytotoxic changes seen in airway epithelial cells. To better evaluate both cytotoxic and sub-cytotoxic changes, researchers have adapted a human airway epithelial cell line for use in the xCELLigence real time cell analyzer to evaluate concentration- and time-dependent effects of toxic compounds. Dr. Boitano will discuss these findings and how they allow us to better understand the toxicity impact of nanoparticles, metals and metalloids, as well as other toxicants, on airway health and disease.
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