[Usefulness of reporter gene assay for AhR agonists, CALUX assay]

The reporter gene expression method CALUX cell bioassay has proven to be a very valuable screening technique for assessing toxic equivalents of dioxin and dioxin-like compounds, because it detects all AhR ligands in a variety of sample matrices. Used with the two specially elaborated clean-up procedures, CALUX cell bioassay was established for various environmental and biological samples. Consequently, the CALUX-TEQ values are correlated with high correlation coefficiencies to WHO-TEQ values derived from HRGC/HRMS. CALUX assay has been applied to the screening and quarantine of food items with possible dioxin contaminations in the EU. In addition, the method has been applied to biological samples such as serum, breast milk and fat tissues. Several reported studies demonstrated that CALUX cell assay is a useful tool and applicable in human epidemiological studies. We need to establish multi-national comparative studies in the field of dioxin contamination.