Thesis supervisor: András Ács
Location of studies (in Hungarian): Gödöllő Abbreviation of location of studies: SZIE
Description of the research topic:
The term micropollutant refers to organic or mineral sub-stances present in waters at trace concentrations, ranging from few ng/L to several µg/L. However, the low concentrations of most micropollutants on their own may not affect the normal functions of the aquatic organisms. In nature, organisms are exposed to a complex mixture of pollutants, which can lead to unexpected dose-responses, and subsequent synergistic and antagonistic effects, as well as additive or non-monotonic dose responses. One of the greatest challenges in toxicology nowadays is to understand the effects of mixtures.
The main aim of the present proposal is the characterization of toxic alterations excited by mixtures of micropollutants, the analysis of mechanistic toxic effects leading to unexpected dose-responses by the assessment of biochemical markers of organisms commonly used in aquatic environmental toxicology. The toolset of applied biochemical markers comprise of measurement of activity changes of xenobiotic-metabolizing and adverse effect mitigating system enzymes, and also markers of induced cell damage.