The work is important because chemicals produced in domestic and industrial processes, as well as in agriculture, are not eliminated by wastewater treatment and end up in our waterways. From there, they accumulate through the food chain, eventually finding their way onto our tables as food and drinking water.
The new framework involved the University of Birmingham, working in partnership with colleagues at Friends of the Muskoka Watershed, in Canada, China Jiliang University and the Alan Turing Institute.
Professor Luisa Orsini, senior-author on the paper, said: “We need better diagnosis of the impact of chemicals on wildlife and humans but also, when chemicals have entered the environment we need a sustainable remediation of their impact. Daphnia is a tiny crustacean the size of a grain of rice and are often-overlooked. Yet they are super abundant and can revolutionise the way we assess and mitigate chemical pollution sustainably. This will have positive effects on human health, helping to prevent illnesses associated with chemical pollution.”
Dr Li, corresponding author on the paper, said: “The case study that we report in the paper shows how using machine learning we can identify bioactive pollutants within ambient chemical mixtures found in river waters, identifying targets for regulators.”
The team anticipate that the approach they have developed could offer a step change in chemical regulation where, typically, chemicals are assessed in isolation and usually at high concentrations, ignoring the cumulative effects of lower doses and of chemical mixtures.
A further important advantage of the new approach is that it offers an opportunity to reduce chemical testing in animals. The framework also shows that nature-based solutions are a promising alternative to current chemical/mechanical processes, to enable water reuse. The University of Birmingham is leading an international partnership to improve chemical safety assessment by using non-traditional, more ethical model species and computational approaches.
The research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme Precision Toxicology; the Alan Turing Institute, the Royal Society International Collaboration Award and the Petroleum Technology Development Fund in Nigeria.
