Development and Evaluation of a Database of Dietary Bioaccumulation Test Data for Organic Chemicals in Fish

Dietary bioaccumulation tests for fish have been conducted for about 40 years. Standardized test guidance has recently been developed. Test metrics of primary scientific and regulatory interest are the whole body depuration rate constant (<i>k</i>_T), whole body growth corrected depuration rate constant (<i>k</i>_Tg), and corresponding chemical half-lives (<i>t</i>_1/2 and <i>t</i>_1/2g), dietary chemical absorption efficiency (AE), and biomagnification factor (BMF). A database of 3032 measurement end points for 477 discrete organic chemicals including 964 half-lives, 1199 AEs and 869 BMFs from 19 species (primarily trout and carp) was developed from the literature. Biological properties (e.g., organism weight, lipid content) and exposure conditions (e.g., temperature, feeding rate, dietary lipid content, exposure duration) are documented. Test chemicals range in molar mass from 120 to 1423 g·mol^–1 with log octanol–water partition coefficients (<i>K</i>_OW) ranging from 0.8 to 14.3; 50% of the database entries are for polychlorinated biphenyls. The measured end points are derived from various protocols and sources of variability are described. The data are evaluated and categorized using proposed data quality (confidence) criteria derived from the standardized test protocol providing initial guidance for data users. Half-lives range from 0.13 to 2600 days; however, approximately 54% have an identifiable source of uncertainty. The data suggest that chemicals absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract with a log <i>K</i>_OW ≥ ∼5 and at least as high as ∼9 have biomagnification potential in fish. A mechanistic bioaccumulation model is compared to the measured data and used to illustrate the influence of growth and biotransformation rates on the BMF