OECD publishes guidance document on developing and assessing Adverse Outcome Pathways

OECD publishes guidance document on developing and assessing Adverse Outcome Pathways

Recently, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a guidance document (No 184) on developing and assessing Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOP). The AOP methodology is an approach which provides a framework to collect, organise and evaluate relevant information on chemical, biological and toxicological effect of chemicals. This approach supports the use of a mode (and/or mechanism) of action basis for understanding adverse effects of chemicals. Our research contributes to this methodology by studying gene-expression patterns in response to toxicants (e.g. Asselman et al. 2012, Vandegehuchte et al. 2010) to extrapolate effects at the molecular level to effects at the organismal level. In addition, our population and ecosystem models (e.g. De Laender et al. 2011, Viaene et al. 2013) allow to extrapolate from this organismal level to even higher levels of organisation as the population or ecosystem. Not only contributes our research to the AOP methodology, it also benefits from it as the AOP for a marine natural toxin, domoic acid, to which we also perform research, is known.