Biological organisms are chronically exposed to low concentrations of neuroactive chemicals, including pharmaceutical compounds. This is especially dramatic in water due to the input of both diffuse and on-site specific contaminant sources for wastewater treatment effluents, which are the main contaminant source of these chemicals. Furthermore, drinking water is one of the main routes of chemical exposure (apart from occupational exposure), where epidemiological approaches have shown causal links between chemical intoxications and neurological related effects in humans. There is a need for both human and environmental health risk assessment to predict sublethal chronic neurotoxic effects of chemicals. COGNITOX project aims to identify hazardous neuroactive chemicals in real samples using the existing behavioural toolbox implemented with new behavioural assays to detect an extensive number of neuroactive chemicals. The project will also allow to relate the chemical fingerprints detected by targeted and non-targeted procedures with behavioral and metabolomics responses using state-of-the-art passive sampling and chemical analyses, chemometric and multivariate data analyses, working with model organisms, such as zebra fish and Daphnia.
Grant PID2020-113371RB-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033
