Bioassays as one of the Green Chemistry tools for assessing environmental quality: A review.

For centuries, mankind has contributed to irreversible environmental changes, but due to the modern science of recent decades, scientists are able to assess the scale of this impact. The introduction of laws and standards to ensure environmental cleanliness requires comprehensive environmental monitoring, which should also meet the requirements of Green Chemistry. The broad spectrum of Green Chemistry principle applications should also include all of the techniques and methods of pollutant analysis and environmental monitoring. The classical methods of chemical analyses do not always match the twelve principles of Green Chemistry, and they are often expensive and employ toxic and environmentally unfriendly solvents in large quantities. These solvents can generate hazardous and toxic waste while consuming large volumes of resources. Therefore, there is a need to develop reliable techniques that would not only meet the requirements of Green Analytical Chemistry, but they could also complement and sometimes provide an alternative to conventional classical analytical methods. These alternatives may be found in bioassays. Commercially available certified bioassays often come in the form of ready-to-use toxkits, and they are easy to use and relatively inexpensive in comparison with certain conventional analytical methods. The aim of this study is to provide evidence that bioassays can be a complementary alternative to classical methods of analysis and can fulfil Green Analytical Chemistry criteria. The test organisms discussed in this work include single-celled organisms, such as cell lines, fungi (yeast), and bacteria, and multicellular organisms, such as invertebrate and vertebrate animals and plants.

Delta-sleep inducing peptide (DSIP) and its fragments as the modulators of neural transmission in the central nervous system.

The present study is a continuation of our previous experiments on DSIP activity which have revealed that nonapeptide DSIP inhibits hippocampal electrical activity of the 4-7 c/s frequency band. The aim of the present study was to find which of the known DSIP fragments is responsible for its activity, i.e. to find the active site of the molecule. The experiments were carried out with the entire DSIP molecule and its three different fragments. The method of threshold continuous arousal pattern (TCAP) monitoring was used as the indicator of DSIP activity. It was found that the entire DSIP molecule increased TCAP, while its 1-5 fragment decreased it 1-4 and 5-9 fragments had no noticeable effect.