Scope

The last few decades of research have firmly established that chemicals in the environment can disrupt normal development and cause disease. This holds true for humans and animals. Normal development is essential for a healthy life, and any perturbation during the sensitive life-stages from conception through to sexual maturity can have consequences; even life stages prior to conception, where insults to parental gametes can also affect the life of following generations.  

Reproductive development is different from other developmental processes in that it also directly influences the potential to create new life. Disrupted reproductive development can lead to numerous adverse health effects, including infertility, genital malformation, reproductive cancers, sexual dysfunction, sexual behavior and more. Safeguarding developmental and reproductive development from harmful environmental insults is therefore of great importance.

The number of anthropogenic chemicals now present in the environment is very high. Testing and regulating them all is a huge task, especially if relying on traditional test methods using in vivo toxicity studies. There is thus a pressing need to establish robust and reliable alternative test methods to more efficiently assess chemical substances to avoid harm to humans or the environment. For this to eventuate, however, we also require solid understanding of molecular mechanisms and causal toxicological pathways.

The specialty section of Developmental and Reproductive Toxicology aims to promote modern toxicology to better test for, and predict, adverse health outcomes caused by early-life exposure to harmful chemicals. This includes a firm focus on characterizing mechanisms of effects and modes of action, from initial perturbation of biomolecules all the way to disease outcomes.

The section covers contributions devoted (but not limited) to:

•Providing new insights into mechanisms of action and causal pathways underlying developmental origins of disease.

•Developing, verifying, or applying alternative test methods (e.g. in silico, in vitro) to predict effect outcomes in complex organisms (e.g. humans, animal models).

•Characterizing sexual dimorphisms beyond the reproductive system to facilitate our understanding of different toxicological effects between sexes.

•Investigating the role of anthropogenic chemicals in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis.

•Characterizing multi-organ effect patterns following developmental exposure to chemicals, as well as sequential effect pattern; i.e. how early perturbations to one system affect susceptibility to later insults.

•Investigating how parental exposures prior to conception can cause disease in the offspring, e.g. germ cell-mediated developmental toxicity.

•Investigating how chemical exposures can affect male and female fertility in adulthood, including the reversibility of effects.

•Describing the role of the placenta in developmental toxicity of chemicals, including sexual dimorphism.

Submission

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