The acute toxicity of bisphenol A and lignin-derived bisphenol in algae, daphnids, and Japanese medaka

Risk assessing newly synthesized chemicals prior to their applications is extremely important, if we want to ensure substitution of risky chemicals with more benign ones. During the past two decades, many analogs of bisphenol A (BPA) have been manufactured, while their toxicity remains less studied. The aim of this study was to compare the acute toxicity of a synthesized lignin-derived BPA (LD-BP) with that of BPA in representative aquatic organisms including two algal species (Chlorella pyrenoidosa and Scenedesmus obliquus), a cladoceran species (Daphnia magna), and the Japanese medaka (Oryzias latipes). The results revealed that the two algal species showed different responses to the two chemicals. For C. pyrenoidosa, both BPA and LD-BP stimulated growth within 48 h of exposure, except for the 50 mg L-1 of LD-BP treatment. After 96 and 144 h of exposures, BPA stimulated the growth of C. pyrenoidosa at low-exposure concentrations but inhibited its growth at high concentrations, while LD-BP caused a concentration-dependent response in C. pyrenoidosa. S. obliquus exhibited a monotonic concentration-response curve for both BPA and LD-BP exposures. For both D. magna and O. latipes, concentration-responses were monotonic with 96 h-LC50 of BPA and LD-BP of 11.7 and 5.0 mg L-1 and 9.4 and 4.1 mg L-1, respectively. Our results demonstrate that LD-BP is more toxic than BPA in the representative aquatic organisms, and it can pose higher ecological risk to the aquatic ecosystem than BPA.