Award winning research at the Annual meeting of the Dutch Society of Toxicology

Samantha Hughes’ and Aafke Saarloos’ research was recognized with a presentation award. Rizal Makarim received the best poster award. The award-winning research reflects the “One Health” approach of the research within the Toxicology at Wageningen University.  Hughes’s work on how pesticide exposure induce Parkinson's disease using the model species Caenorhabditis elegans. Saarloos presented the outcome of her investigation into the deaths of swallow colonies in the Netherlands, which suggests a "blind spot" in how we assess chemical safety for birds. Makarim showed that some specific microplastics from plastic products trigger the secretion of signalling molecules by human macrophages using THP-1 derived macrophages.

These three research project are nice illustrations of the theme this year’s symposium “Toxicology at every scale – from molecules to ecosystems”.

We kicked off with a talk about the impact of human biomonitoring. The workshops encouraged us to learn more about communication and PBK modelling, and the lunch breaks allowed time to catch up with old colleagues, like Véronique de Bruijn, who now works for the RIVM. Day 2 had a focus on pesticides and started with a talk about multi-scale ecology and how the group of Marco Visser (Leiden) combines mechanistic modelling, machine learning and environmental datasets to study the environmental fate and impact of pesticides.