Endocrine Disrupting Effects of Airborne Particle Matter and Their Responsible Constituents

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There is an increasing environmental concern on exogenious chemicals that exhibit adverse effects on endocrine systems of human and wild life, so-called endocrine disrupting substances. Endocrine disrupting effects of airborne suspended particulate matter (SPM) has also attracted much attention. Therefore, wecollected SPM in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, and Sapporo, Hokkaido, at April, July, October and January. Then, we assayed their endocrine disrupting effects in cultured human-originated cell lines and investigated the responsible constituents. The results obtained are described below. 1. Everey SPM samples exhibited the antiestrogenic and antiandrogenic effects. 2. At both Kanazawa and Sapporo, SPM samples showed greater effect in winter than in summer. This was considered to be due to increased energy consumption in winter compared with that in summer. 3. The endocrine disrupting effects of SPM samples were redued when the cells were treated with SPM samples in combination with an aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) agonist. This results indicated that the endocrine disrupting effects were due in part to constituents acting as an AhR agonists. 4. Since polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are typical AhR agonists in environment, several PAHs were determined for their concentration in SPM samples and assayed for their endocrine disrupting effects. The results revealed that the endocrine disrupting effects of SPM samples are based in part on PAHs. 5. Competitive hormone receptor binding assay and yeast two-hybrid assay revealed that SPM samples contains the constituents capable to bind to estrogen receptor or androgen receptor as antagonists.