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New Technology Employed to Study Effects of Conazole Fungicides
Conazoles, a class of fungicides used in agriculture and in pharmaceutical products, kill fungi by inhibiting an enzyme needed for building fungal cell walls. They're quite useful when you're trying to knock out a yeast infection or keep the putting green in tip-top shape. However, some conazoles are also toxic to different organs in rodents and can cause liver tumors in mice, thyroid tumors in rats, and reproductive problems in rats.
While all of these fungicides produce effects in the liver, the specific events that take place on the cell level are not known. This information is important because it will offer clues to scientists about which fungicides may cause adverse health effects in humans. Despite much study, scientists have been unable to analyze and categorize conazoles using traditional toxicologic methods.
As a result, scientists with EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) have developed a comprehensive assessment of conazoles by simultaneously using traditional toxicology methods and the new technology of transcriptional profiling called genomics. Simply put, genomics looks beyond specific tissues or organs to study an organism at the gene level. Thus, scientists can examine all of an organism's genetic material at once to determine which of its 30,000 genes are turned on or off after chemical exposure. This combined approach successfully identified common pathways of disease among the conazole class of chemicals.
The research is part of the human health multi-year plan in harmonization and mode of action which looks for common ways that chemicals cause their adverse health effects. These studies show how the new genomic technology has the potential to more completely and rapidly describe key biologic events to inform risk assessment, with a goal of better human health protection.