Mixture Toxicities of Three Pesticides Having Different Time-Toxicity Profiles

In the environment,chemical pollutants always exist as mixtures.To evaluate mixture toxicity,we should ex-amine the concentration ratios and the concentration levels of mixture components as well as the interactive time between the components and testing organism.Selecting three pesticides,metribuzin(MET),dodine(DOD)and ri-domil(RID),as mixture components,Vibrio qinghaiensis sp.-Q67 as testing organism,and 96-well microplate as exposure experiment carrier,the luminescence inhibition toxicities of the pesticides and their binary mixtures at six exposure time points(0.25,2,4,8,12,and 16 h)were determined.The results showed that the three pesticides have different time-toxicity profiles.The toxicity of MET increases over time,and those of DOD and RID show a slight decrease or increase in the first 4 h,respectively,and then remain unchanged to 16 h.The toxicities of the binary mixtures consisting of the three pesticides depend on not only the mixture composition but also the exposure time.The time-toxicity profiles of all rays in MET-DOD mixture system are U-shaped curves,those in MET-RID system are basically monotonically increased and those in DOD-RID system are basically monotonically decreased.How-ever,our findings indicate that for the test substances,mixture toxicity can be predicted by the extended concentra-tion addition model.

Supercritical fluid-assisted controllable fabrication of open and highly interconnected porous scaffolds for bone tissue engineering

Recently tremendous progress has been evidenced by the advancements in developing innovative three-dimensional(3 D)scaffolds using various techniques for addressing the autogenous grafting of bone. In this work, we demonstrated the fabrication of porous polycaprolactone(PCL) scaffolds for osteogenic differentiation based on supercritical fluid-assisted hybrid processes of phase inversion and foaming. This eco-friendly process resulted in the highly porous biomimetic scaffolds with open and interconnected architectures. Initially, a 2^3 factorial experiment was designed for investigating the relative significance of various processing parameters and achieving better control over the porosity as well as the compressive mechanical properties of the scaffold. Then, single factor experiment was carried out to understand the effects of various processing parameters on the morphology of scaffolds. On the other hand, we encapsulated a growth factor, i.e., bone morphogenic protein-2(BMP-2), as a model protein in these porous scaffolds for evaluating their osteogenic differentiation. In vitro investigations of growth factor loaded PCL scaffolds using bone marrow stromal cells(BMSCs) have shown that these growth factor-encumbered scaffolds were capable of differentiating the cells over the control experiments. Furthermore, the osteogenic differentiation was confirmed by measuring the cell proliferation, and alkaline phosphatase(ALP) activity, which were significantly higher demonstrating the active bone growth. Together, these results have suggested that the fabrication of growth factor-loaded porous scaffolds prepared by the eco-friendly hybrid processing efficiently promoted the osteogenic differentiation and may have a significant potential in bone tissue engineering.