Environmentally based chemical toxicity is becoming an increasingly prevalent problem in industrial and post-industrial societies. Many chemicals used in both a production capacity or from the food industry have accumulated in the environment or food chain to toxic levels. Understanding the action of what are frequently xenobiotic substances is a challenge.

One path of action for xenobiotics is through existing cellular processes, such as membrane transport phenomena or biochemical pathways. Technologies developed or available through the BRC integrated platforms target many of these processes. For this reason the BRC has established a Toxicology Research Module, coordinated by J. Laskin of Rutgers University to bring these technologies to bear on environmental health issues.

As part of our activities in reproductive health, we demonstrated the inhibition of the V-type proton pump (ATPase) by the metal cadmium. This toxin is known to occur in tobacco and to be a product of aluminum smelting. In both cases, exposure to these environments is known to reduce male fertility.

Although much current emphasis is on relatively recent toxic environmental changes, some sites of pollution go back hundreds to thousands of years. Acidic rivers are good examples, frequently arising near sites of human activity. The BRC, in collaboration with the MBL Bay Paul Center for Molecular Evolution and funded by NSF and NASA, completed a study on the method of survival of the abundant protist life forms present in these extreme acidic conditions. The river in our study area, the Rio Tinto, has a pH of 1-2. The organisms had a near normal cytolsolic pH, around 6.5. We found that their ability to maintain this neutral pH was due to a combination of a positive membrane potential, reversing the electric gradient for proton permeability, and a 7% higher energy budget.