The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

The adverse effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) on marine organisms raise the concern of their potential risk to marine environment, which remains unclear until now. The calculation of a species sensitivity distribution (SSD) is a commonly accepted approach to derive the predicted no-effect concentration (PNEC) of a substance in the context of environmental risk assessment (ERA) including EDCs. In this study, some newly emerging methods evolved from SSD which have been adopted for EDCs or have the potential adapting to EDCs were reviewed and compared, mainly including the toxicity-normalized SSD (SSDn), probabilistic SSD (PSSD), model averaging SSD, and species sensitivity–weighted distribution (SSWD), etc. In addition, considering the endocrine disrupting effects of EDCs on particular endpoints of specific taxonomic groups and their mode of action, the roles of adverse outcome pathway (AOP) and taxon-specific AOP played in SSD method development were also discussed. As a case study, we selected triclosan (TCS) as a typical EDC and developed AOP of TCS from aquatic organism point of view for the first time to facilitate toxicity endpoints screening and evaluation. Afterwards, PNECs of TCS for protecting native species living in seawater and sediment environments of China were derived, respectively. This study provides preliminary understanding of risk assessment methods of EDCs and possible future research directions.

EDCs, PNEC, toxicity-normalized SSD, probabilistic SSD, model averaging SSD, SSWD, triclosan