Evaluation of selected lipid methods for normalizing pollutant bioaccumulation

Current environmental models use organism lipid concentrations to estimate maximum pollutant bioaccumulation potentials. This collaborative study has shown that significantly different lipid concentrations (3.5X) are found when using common, but different, extraction solvents and methods. Based on these variable lipid values, models that estimate tissue pollutant concentrations normalized to lipid will give significantly different bioaccumulation estimates. To reduce that variability, a standard lipid method needs to be developed or adopted.