Summary
The 1996 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act and the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act required the US EPA to develop a programme to screen and test chemicals used in large volumes that may contaminate water and food, to assess their potential activity as endocrine disrupters. More specifically, the chemicals are to be tested for their ability to affect oestrogenic, androgenic and thyroid functions. It is not yet possible to determine which chemicals are oestrogenic from their molecular structures. Therefore, bioassays are an important tool to determine whether or not a compound has oestrogenic activity.
The E-SCREEN assay is a simple, fast, reproducible, and reliable bioassay to identify suspected xenoestrogens. Once the argument that proliferation represents the most reliable parameter to identify suspected xenoestrogens is acknowledged, ways to automate the E-SCREEN assay may satisfy the demands of the law to speedily screen oestrogen agonists and antagonists. Efforts in this direction are currently under way.
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References
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Sonnenschein, C., Soto, A.M. (2001). Reflections on Bioanalytical Techniques for Detecting Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals. In: Nicolopoulou-Stamati, P., Hens, L., Howard, C.V. (eds) Endocrine Disrupters. Environmental Science and Technology Library, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9769-2_2
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