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Fate of estrogenic compounds in agricultural soils and development of an immunoassay for their environmental detection

Estrogens produced by livestock can be released into soils when their manure is spread onto agricultural land. This is the first study to determine the sorption of a range of estrogens in a wide range of soils at the regional scale, including the sorption of the phytoestrogen equol which had never been previously studied. Sorption increased in the order of 17β-estradiol=estriol <estrone<equol in surface soils collected from 41 agricultural fields in Alberta and was significantly positively correlated with soil organic carbon content (SOC) for all estrogens. 17β-estradiol was further investigated and its mineralization in non-amended and manure-amended soils never exceeded 30% at 90 days, which suggest that even under optimum environmental conditions for mineralization, 17β-estradiol or its metabolites estrone and/or estriol appear to have a relatively long persistence in Alberta soils. Maximum 17β-estradiol mineralization was significantly positively correlated with sorption and hence increased in soils with greater SOC such as those used in this study with a long-term history of solid beef manure applications. Two ELISAs were developed using rabbit polyclonal antibodies for future field experiments and environmental monitoring. Of these, a developed 17β-estradiol+estrone+estriol ELISA could detect estriol in water from an edge of field experiment at concentrations as low as 1 ng mL-1.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/4730
Date24 June 2011
CreatorsCaron, Emmanuelle
ContributorsFarenhorst, Annemieke (Soil Science) Sheedy, Claudia (Soil Science), Hanson, Mark (Environmental Geography) Flaten, Don (Soil Science) Topp, Edward (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)
Source SetsUniversity of Manitoba Canada
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish

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