Due to growing concerns about public health and ecosystem vitality, the environmental fate of synthetic organics is attracting increasing attention from the public, engineers, health care workers, and scientists. Of particular interest is how chemicals used for agriculture persist in watersheds, interact with soil, and accumulate within biological membranes. Bioaccumulation describes a solute’s ability to concentrate preferentially within a biological membrane relative the surrounding environment and is often described using the solute's octanol/water partitioning coefficient (log P). The log P scale has long historical legacy; while instructive, however, log P fails to describe the specific <i>chemical</i> interactions that are responsible for bioaccumulation. Findings presented in this work evaluate the tendency of Dicamba, an herbicide commonly found in Montana surface and ground waters, to accumulate in model biological membranes. Dicamba is very water soluble and has a log P value of 2.6, predicting that the solute will not interact with the soil but <i>will</i> interact with a biological membrane. This work employs steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy in combination with differential scanning calorimetry to study how Dicamba interacts when introduced to biological membranes, specifically, lipid bilayer vesicles. Data from experiments are used to create a molecular based understanding of bioaccumulation of ecologically relevant solutes in chemically complex environments.

Quantitative membrane partitioning studies of ecologically relevant synthetic organic molecules

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.