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<p>The overall goal of this project is to provide the food industry with tools to screen for endocrine disrupting effects of food packaging migrants and the long-term impact of this project is an increased consumer confidence in safety of food packaging. All industry involved in the manufacturing and sales of food products and consumers will benefit from this study. It will also provide the food-packaging industry with information on which BPA alternatives are safe to use. If NYS industry adopts the screening tools established by this study, it would place NYS food industry ahead of the game and boost consumer confidence in products made in NYS. The screening tool can also be applied to food packaging and food products imported from foreign countries where regulations may not be as rigorous as in the US. The following are main objectives of this study: </p><p>Objective 1: Generate variety of lines of fish containing genes tagged with green fluorescent protein (GFP) using CRISPR/Cas9 system and test toxicity of leachate from food packaging material.</p><p>Objective 2: Test variety of compounds that have been used as an alternative to BPA for their endocrine disrupting effects. </p>
Food packaging has become an indispensable part of the food supply in the U.S. and throughout the world. It protects food from variety of adverse environmental conditions and physical damage, thus maintaining food safety as well as preserving nutritional benefits, allowing products to be transported over time and long distances. Food and beverage packaging constitutes more than half of all packaging market which held a global market value of $400 billion in 2012, making it one of the most important industrial sectors. However recent research have raised awareness in the consumer as well as in the food industry on concerns for food packing migrants, chemical compounds leaching out into food and be ingested by humans. Particularly, endocrine disrupting effects of food packaging migrants such as bisphenol A (BPA) have raised significant health concerns in the past decade. Due to the FDA ban in children's toys, sippy cups, and infant formula packaging and from public pressure, BPA has been voluntarily replaced with alternative compounds in recent years, but such compounds are still not fully tested for their toxicological effects. Because endocrine disrupting compounds can cause adverse health effect at very low doses and does not necessarily follow the classic toxicology principles of 'dose makes the poison', current regulations do not sufficiently protect the safety of chemicals that can be used in food packaging and migrate out into food. The uncertainties of safety and partial regulatory ban have unfortunately triggered further public distrust towards the industry and the regulatory agency. Performing toxicity studies using mammalian models, such as rodents, are very costly and time consuming. In this project, we will develop an affordable and high-throughput in vivo model using zebrafish to provide industry with screening tools to ensure the safety of their products to consumers.