Brief communication: new perspectives on the calculation of bioaccumulation factors for active substances in living organisms
AbstractToday, there are no ready-to-use convenient tools in ecotoxicology to diagnose and predict the accumulation and effects of chemical substances on living organisms, accounting for exposure situations that are known to be complex (routes of exposure, metabolization processes, cocktail effects, etc.). Regarding plant protection products in marketing authorization applications, regulation No 283/2013 (EU) defines the data requirements for active substances with a bioaccumulation test on fish according to OECD Test guideline 305. This paper presents new perspectives on the estimation of the bioaccumulation factors via an innovative ready-to-use web tool providing these factors, associated with their uncertainty to facilitate the daily work of regulators, but also of any user, by benefiting of a freely available and user-friendly on-line interface avoiding to invest into underlying mathematical and statistical technicalities. This tool, MOSAICbioacc, is available at https://mosaic.univ-lyon1.fr/bioacc, and can be used by any environmental scientists, ecotoxicologists or managers when accumulation-depuration data are collected and need to be easily and quickly analysed.