Effects of a mixture of endocrine disrupting compounds on growth and metabolism in a chicken embryo model

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Project Description

The project is part of an EU project called EDC-MixRisk which aims to improve our understanding of health effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals. In EDC-MixRisk, a mixture of common chemicals have been identified in blood from pregnant women in Sweden and associated with risk for altered growth in their children. In this part of the project we use chicken embryos as a model to investigate how this mixture affects end points related to growth and metabolism in the developing embryo. The exposed chicken embryos will be examined for instance regarding body weight, amount of fat tissue, accumulation of fat in the liver and metabolic changes. The amount of fat in the liver is determined using a histological fat staining technique followed by quantitative analysis of microscopic images.

Tags: Microscopy, model organisms and tissues