Laura N Vandenberg

..These data indicate that BPA may be capable of altering important events during critical periods of brain development...

..Thus, fundamental changes in chemical testing and safety determination are needed to protect human health...

..Within the past 3 years, four major evaluations of bisphenol A (BPA) safety have been undertaken. However, these assessments have arrived at quite different conclusions regarding the safety of BPA at current human exposure levels...

..The two toxicokinetic studies that suggested human BPA exposure is negligible have significant deficiencies, are directly contradicted by hypothesis-driven studies, and are therefore not reliable for risk assessment purposes...

..The reported levels of BPA in human fluids are higher than the BPA concentrations reported to stimulate molecular endpoints in vitro and appear to be within an order of magnitude of the levels needed to induce effects in animal models...

..Future studies to assess the role of estrogen receptors as mediators of BPA action require estrogen receptor knock-out mice that were generated on a C57Bl6 background. The sensitivity of the C57Bl6 strain to estradiol and BPA is unknown...

..These results suggest that alterations in mammary gland phenotypes observed at puberty and adulthood in perinatally exposed mice have their origins in fetal development...

..Thus, there are concerns that the amount of BPA to which humans are exposed may cause adverse health effects. Importantly, results from a large number of biomonitoring studies are at odds with the results from two toxicokinetic studies...

..Similar structures have also been observed following exposure to other estrogens. These results are further evidence that perinatal BPA exposure can alter the morphology of the rodent mammary gland in adulthood...

..Hence, both animal experiments and epidemiological data strengthen the hypothesis that foetal exposure to xenooestrogens may be an underlying cause of the increased incidence of breast cancer observed over the last 50 years...

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..These results may provide insight into gynecomastia, the most common male breast disease in humans, where proliferation of the mammary epithelium leads to breast enlargement...

..This non-monotonic dose-response in the mammary gland may reflect complex interactions, where estrogen can act on multiple targets either as an agonist or antagonist...

..We conclude that Rab11-mediated transport is responsible for the movement of cargo within early blastomeres, and that Rab11 expression is required throughout the early embryo for proper LR patterning...

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..These data suggest that even anatomically symmetrical structures may possess subtle but consistent laterality and interact with other developmental left-right patterning pathways...

..The results uniformly support a role for serotonin in the cleavage-stage embryo, long before the appearance of cilia, in ventral right blastomeres that do not contribute to the ciliated organ...

..The results of this study support the conclusion that low frequency vibrations are toxic to aquatic vertebrates, with detrimental effects observed in two important model species with very different embryonic architectures...

..genesis 50:219-234, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc...