In recent years, we have become aware of our exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that can bind to specific receptors because of their similarity to endogenous hormones. They can act as either agonists or antagonists of said receptors. One of the endocrine disrupting chemicals is bisphenol A, a synthetic chemical used in polycarbonate plastic, epoxy resins, and thermal paper. Exposure to bisphenol A occurs primarily through food, plastic food containers, water, thermal paper, and the air as plastic is burnt. Due to the increased incidence of various endocrine system disorders and their association with bisphenol A, it is being used less and less. It is replaced by its analogues, which are poorly studied. The aim of our work was to investigate the usefulness of replacing bisphenol A with its analogues in terms of its effect on estrogen receptors.
We tested 13 analogues for cytotoxicity with resazurin, for agonistic and antagonistic effect on estrogen receptors α, which was performed on hERα-HeLa-9903 cells using the luciferase enzyme assay. We followed the OECD 455 protocol and calculated IC30, PC10, PC50, EC50, and RPCMAX to determine their agonistic or antagonistic effects.
Bisphenols C, G, PH showed cytotoxicity at concentrations of 25 µM, so they were excluded from further evaluation. We concluded that bisphenols G, AP, B, E, C, S, dinitrobisphenol A, tetrachlorobisphenol A and DD70 showed agonistic effects on estrogen receptor α. On the other hand, bisphenols G, PH, dinitrobisphenol A, TGSH, BPSIP, and DD70 showed antagonistic effects.
We had no major problems with the evaluation of agonistic effects, and our results were comparable to those previously published. We concluded that the phenolic OH groups with the correct spacing are crucial for binding to the receptor and that the analogues with a substitution at the C atom of the bridge best mimic estradiol. However, the evaluation of antagonistic effects was more problematic, and the variation between our results was larger, so our results were not necessarily in agreement with those of other research groups. We propose to investigate the effects of bisphenol A analogues on estrogen receptor α further to understand it better. We only studied the effects on estrogen receptors α; for more accurate results, other estrogen receptors should also be studied.
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