LIFE’s emerging elite research area – Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology
The battle for cleaner consumer products and a greener environment
There are more than 100,000 different chemical compounds on the European market, and new ones are introduced every year. To prevent serious environmental and human health impacts, it is important that up-to-date knowledge is always available to the authorities, chemical producers and the public. This is to ensure that risk assessments, regulation and legislation are able to protect the environment and public health. With this end in view, a group of researchers in LIFE’s emerging elite research area within Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology are working on generating knowledge on how chemicals behave in and interact with the environment.
By Katherina Killander
We asked anchorperson and Associate Professor Nina Cedergreen eight questions about the emerging elite research area:
1. Where is research in environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology heading at the moment?
2. How does LIFE contribute worldwide to research within environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology?
3. Which promising research projects would you otherwise like to mention?
4. If the elite research area becomes the projected success in the coming years, what do you hope to achieve?
5. How will LIFE students benefit from this emerging elite research area?
6. What are your considerations in relation to working with companies, authorities or others who may have a particular interest in this specific elite research area?
7. Where can you follow the elite research area’s results?
8. Who is behind the elite research area?
1. Where is research in environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology heading at the moment?
Up to now, almost all research within environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology has focused on understanding how individual chemicals behave in the environment. However, chemicalss used in, for example, the textile industry, the food industry or in agriculture never exist isolated. Therefore their dangerous properties cannot, or should not, be measured and assessed in isolation.
Chemicals in a complex world
Consequently, researchers are starting to focus on how the transportation, transformation and human health and environmental effects are affected when the chemicals are part of a complex world where they interact with each other and with the environment.
This means that a compound which is harmless on its own may be hazardous when combined with certain other compounds. For this reason, researchers are starting to take a more holistic perspective.
Natural compounds are just as hazardous as chemicals
This also means that such issues as the fate and effect of bioactive natural compounds are coming into focus. These have previously been ignored because the compounds are natural. However, in a holistic perspective, it has been shown that they may be just as dangerous as factory-made chemicals.
2. How does LIFE contribute worldwide to research within environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology?
This elite research area is special because it boasts leading experts within ecotoxicology, microbiology, genetics, chemometrics, geochemistry and analytical and environmental chemistry.
In many other fields, the different disciplines are isolated, but at LIFE we are working together in the same place. For this reason, we are able to integrate research in contaminants from when they are released into the environment until their impact is manifested.
This interdisciplinary cooperation enables us to examine issues which are otherwise often overlooked because they exist in the borderland between the various disciplines.
Chemical fingerprints
One thing that we are particularly occupied with is chemical fingerprinting. Instead of meticulous and expensive measurements of a couple of compounds in a few soil or water samples, we have developed different analytical and statistical techniques to help us measure the chemical fingerprints of environmental samples.
These chemical fingerprints contain information on the content of hundreds of chemical compounds in the samples. The chemical fingerprints can be compared to tests of the toxicity to plants, small animals or microorganisms of the same samples. A number of statistical models are then used to calculate which parts of the chemical fingerprint (and ultimately, which compounds) best describe the toxicity of the sample.
By measuring chemical fingerprints instead of individual compounds in the environment, it will be possible to study the fate and effect of previously unknown (but potentially toxic) compounds such as decomposition products of oils, which may sometimes be even more toxic and mobile than the original compounds.
Similarly, compounds which you may not initially believe are toxic, such as natural compounds, will be discovered. This would not be possible if you were only measuring a predetermined compound, which is what mostly happens today.
3. Which promising research projects would you otherwise like to mention?
Our research into low-dose effects, the impact of contaminants on antibiotic resistance in bacteria and bioavailability.
The long-term effects of low toxic doses
With regard to low-dose effects, we are examining what happens when plants and other organisms are exposed to pesticides in low doses which will not immediately kill them. What are the long-term effects, and how do the low doses affect the physiology of plants and animals?
Here, we are mainly drawing on the expertise of chemists, biotechnologists and molecular biologists to examine what the compounds do to the plant’s way of expressing its genes (gene expression, ed.) and synthesising metabolites.
In the antibiotic resistance project, microbiologists and chemists are cooperating to find out how metal contamination can increase the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. This is yet another example of how low doses of contaminants may have unforeseen effects which we would like to prevent.
In soil and sediments, the bioavailability of contaminants, and, thus, their toxicity, decomposition and leaching, is fully controlled by their binding to soil particles. We are working intensively to improve our understanding of the binding processes, and here, it is also important to understand the interactions when compounds are combined.
The Environmental Chemistry and Health MSc programmeme
However, one thing is what different toxins and compounds do to our environment; another is how they affect our health. This is a key aspect of LIFE’s new Environmental Chemistry and Health MSc programme, which is based within this research area.
The programme is offered in cooperation with the Faculty of Science (NAT), the Faculty of Health Sciences (SUND), the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FARMA), the Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), with the Copenhagen University Hospital and the National Research Centre for the Working Environment as participating lecturers.
LIFE students are doing fieldwork worldwide
Currently, we have an MSc student writing her thesis in Vietnam. She is studying the extent to which fish and vegetables bred and cultivated in contaminated water accumulate this contamination. Another student is studying the extent to which hormone-disrupting compounds may migrate from food packaging to the food. And a third student is doing fieldwork in Greenland to study whether environmental toxins are released into drinking water as the climate becomes warmer and the permafrost disappears.
Other students are looking into the effect of toxins on polar bears, the impact of nanoproducts in sunscreen on the soil environment, the interrelation between bioavailability and toxicity and the impact of air pollution on humans. The students may have supervisors at all the institutions involved in the MSc programme.
In addition to the many international contacts made while travelling, attending conferences and staying abroad, the cross institutional MSc programme gives the students on the Environmental Chemistry and Health an extensive interdisciplinary network in Denmark.
International conferences create progress
In addition to this, we regularly co-organize a number of international events. For a recent conference on cocktail effects, we invited influential representatives from the EU and USA within pesticide legislators, researchers as well as a number of stakeholders from the industry. The aim was to shed light on how the new knowledge on cocktail effects may best be incorporated into future legislation.
Another conference, which will be held here at LIFE this summer, concerns research in new contaminants. For further information on this conference, please go to: emcon2011.com
4. If the elite research area becomes successful in the coming years, what do you hope to achieve?
Then we will have created an integrated platform for environmental research at LIFE which is internationally known for its interdisciplinary research into how contaminants behave in and affect the environment.
We would like to contribute to the paradigm shift from focusing on the transportation, transformation and impacts of individual compounds in the environment to looking into the same processes for the cocktail of chemicals that already exist out there.
This scientific environment will attract both students and international researchers and create the scientific foundation required to deliver cleaner consumer products and legislation that can ensure a sustainable use of these products and protection of environmental and human health.
5. How will LIFE students benefit from this emerging elite research area?
“As already mentioned, we have the Environmental Chemistry and Health MSc programme which is anchored directly in the emerging elite research area. The MSc is an elite MSc, which means, among other things, that we have extra resources for things such as conferences, travelling and laboratory tests.
All natural resource students at LIFE are guaranteed access to the Environmental Chemistry and Health MSc programme and will benefit from the Danish and international network. In addition, all our dedicated researchers, their PhDs and postdocs provide lots of scope for writing projects within the research field. All interested students are welcome to participate in the conferences, workshops and seminars held at LIFE.
We work closely with the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, which we both discuss various issues with and provide counseling to. They also have has supported some of our research projects. We are also continuing to seek out projects with a number of companies within both product development and ‘clean tech’.
A number of the ‘old’ environmental chemistry candidates are now working for consultancy firms such as NIRAS and DHI, for production companies such as NOVO, Haldor Topsøe and Dupont and in organisations such as the Danish Cancer Society, in agricultural organisations and in the environmental departments and centres in the Danish regions and municipalities. We try to stay in contact and use them in our teaching and in connection with enterprise visits.
In this way, we are able to ensure that they are always aware of what the new candidates have to offer, while we can keep up to date with what is going on in the world. These personal relations also make it possible to find relevant partners in industry relatively quickly when a new project idea presents itself.
7. Where can you follow the elite research area’s results?
On www.life.ku.dk/english. If possible, we would like to create a separate website for the elite research area. But so far we have not had the resources to do so.
However, some of the projects are described on the departments’ (Department of Basic Sciences and Environment, the Department of Agriculture and Ecology and the Department of Plant Biology and Biotechnology) and the relevant people’s websites. The Environmental Chemistry and Health MSc programme has its own website which provides more specific information on the contents of the programme and the projects that people are working on.
8. Who is behind the elite research area?
The key persons in the elite research area are:
• Bjarne W. Strobel, who is working with analytical chemistry, focusing on organic pollutants in soil, water and ecosystems
• Jan H. Christensen, who is working with analytical chemistry and chemometry, focusing on developing analytical and chemometric techniques for chemical fingerprinting and profiling of complex compounds
• Peter E. Holm, is an environmental chemist focusing on metal sorption and speciation
• Hans Christian Bruun Hansen, is an environmental chemist focusing on boundary layer chemistry, sorption processes, the geochemistry and environmental chemistry of iron and the environmental chemistry of bioactive natural compounds
• Kristian K. Brandt, is an environmental microbiologist and microbial ecotoxicologist focusing on antibiotic/metal resistance development and biosensors
• Søren Bak, is a molecular biologist focusing on biosynthesis, evolution of effects of bioactive low-molecular constituents of plants and their interaction with abiotic and biotic stress
• Nina Cedergreen, is an ecotoxicologist focusing on cocktail effects and sublethal effects of chemical stress
These key persons work in LIFE’s Department of Basic Sciences and Environment, the Department of Agriculture and Ecology and Department of Plant Biology and Biotechnology, but they also cooperate with other departments at LIFE as well as faculties and departments outside LIFE.
Kirsten Jenlev, - last update:14 November 2011