Advocates for the incorporation of green chemistry into undergraduate education have long called for chemistry majors to have some coursework in toxicology. For many undergraduate institutions, this suggestion is difficult or impossible to implement for a variety of reasons. In 2007, the National Research Council published <i>Toxicity Testing in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century</i>, which outlined a new vision for toxicity testing. One of the concepts presented in that document was the idea of a toxicity pathway, a cellular pathway that when sufficiently perturbed would result in adverse health effects. Toxicity pathways and the related concept of adverse outcome pathways can function as an effective bridge between existing  undergraduate biochemistry courses and the toxicology concerns of the green chemistry community. This presentation will provide an overview of toxicity and adverse outcome pathways before moving on to describe how these concepts have been incorporated into a one semester biochemistry course at Saint Vincent designed for chemistry majors. Topics where toxicity and adverse outcome pathways have been incorporated include signal transduction, metabolic regulation, and processes involving nucleic acids (replication, DNA repair, regulation of transcription). In addition to describing specific examples from the course, this presentation will also explore possible implications of toxicity and adverse outcome pathways for the two semester biochemistry sequence which often serves, in part, as preparation for the MCAT. Possible approaches to assessment will also be described.

Toxicity and adverse outcome pathways as a connecting concept between toxicology and undergraduate biochemistry

254th National Meeting (2017)

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