Publication
18 Mar 2020

Aquatic toxicity of petroleum substances: Extending the validation of the biomimetic extraction (BE) method for use in hazard assessments

Report no. 3/20: Analysis of Water Accommodated Fractions (WAFs) of petroleum product samples using Biomimetic Extraction (BE) with solid phase microextraction (SPME) predicts accumulation and baseline toxicity of chemicals with a narcotic mode of action. Recent BE-SPME screening of WAFs of a large set of petroleum product samples (e.g. naphthas, kerosines, heavy fuel oils, cracked gas oils and other gas oils), supported by high quality compositional data, has been carried out. Compositional  data have been used to predict toxicity values in toxic units (TU) and accumulation in target lipid (CTL) from the TU data.

These data confirm that BE-SPME data correlate to accumulation in target lipid (CTL) and as such provide additional support to the use of BE-SPME as a practical screening tool for assessing aquatic toxicity of petroleum substances and addressing the influence of variation in substance composition on aquatic toxicity within petroleum product categories.

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