Intra- and Interspecies Variation in Bioconcentration Potential of Polychlorinated Biphenyls: Are All Lipids Equal?

The variation among bioconcentration factors (BCFs) available in the literature is commonly ascribed to experimental parameters and metabolic capacity. Though bioconcentration is generally considered to be governed by partitioning processes and therefore to depend on the composition of the partition phases, the effect of lipid composition on BCFs measured for hydrophobic organic chemicals has largely escaped attention. The reason may be that the effect cannot easily be studied separately in a conventional BCF test setup and that any subtle effects will often be obscured by the variation normally observed when working with living organisms. In the present study, this variation was circumvented by substituting biota with biological homogenates, which allowed measuring chemical partitioning in a fashion that has proved successful for many other environmental matrixes (e.g., sediments, soils, carbonaceous materials). The appropriateness of using a homogenate as a representation of the organism from which it was derived was demonstrated by a good agreement between homogenate-water partition coefficients (or necroconcentration factors; NCFs) and actual BCFs for PCBs and aquatic worms. Subsequent experiments focused on the intra- and interspecies differences in lipid-normalized NCFs. Intraspecies variation was studied for aquatic worms and sticklebacks, which were acclimatized at different temperatures (5-24 °C), whereas interspecies variation was investigated by determining NCFs for eight different aquatic species. Although temperature-induced intraspecies differences were subtle (