In vitro eye corrosion study of agrochemicals on isolated chicken eye

Agrochemicals must undergo numberless toxicological tests before marketing. The eye irritation test is part of this test packet. Nowadays, OECD 405 can be used to classify the irritation potential of substances, the base of the OECD 405 guideline is the Draize test, which is one of the most criticized in vivo methods because of the injuries of the test animals and subjective nature of the test in recording the results. Therefore, several in vitro tests have been developed to replace totally or partly the in vivo eye irritation testing. The isolated chicken eye test method (OECD 438), which was used, is one of these alternative methods. Five different agrochemicals were examined in the following way: All test compounds were applied in a single dose onto the cornea of isolated chicken eyes in order to potentially classify the test compounds as ocular corrosive and/or severe irritant. The damages caused by the test substances were assessed by the determination of corneal swelling, opacity, fluorescein retention and morphological effects. These parameters were evaluated pre-treatment and starting at approximately 30, 75, 120, 180, and 240 minutes after the post-treatment rinse. The endpoints evaluated were corneal opacity, swelling, fluorescein retention and morphological effects. All of the endpoints, with the exception of fluorescein retention (which was determined only at pre-treatment and 30 minutes after test substance exposure) were determined at each of the above time points. Positive and negative controls were used and they showed the expected results in each study. In these in vitro eye corrosives and severe irritants studies, using the Isolated Chicken Eye model with five different products, no ocular corrosion or severe irritation potential were observed. These results correspond to the available information about the tested agrochemicals, so these studies with isolated chicken eye are considered to be successful.