Evaluation of combined toxicity of Siduron and cadmium on earthworm (Eisenia fetida) using Biomarker Response Index

Abstract Agrochemicals and heavy metals are widespread contaminants in urban soil and could co-exist as mixture, which could cause unexpected risk to terrestrial organism. To assess the joint effect of herbicide Siduron and Cd, a battery of sub-lethal biomarkers was studied using earthworm ecotoxicological assay. Most selected biomarkers appeared significant but complicated responses with the increasing concentration of contaminants after 28-day exposure. In order to quantify the overall effect of the mixture contaminants, Biomarker Response Index (BRI) was used to integrate the multiple responses. Concentration Addition Index (CAI) and Effect Addition Index (EAI) were introduced to assess types of joint effect. Results showed significantly dose-effect responses between BRI and contaminant exposure concentrations. Integrated toxicity increased obviously under joint treatments of Siduron and Cd compared to their individual treatments. According to CAI, a clear antagonism was observed at relatively lower effects and gradually transformed to slight synergism with an increase of effects, while EAI showed the joint effect of addition at the whole range of effect levels. Thus, compared to the simple analysis of those complicated responses, BRI is an effective method to determine the integrated toxicity of mixture and its combination with joint effect indices (CAI and EAI) provides more worthy risk assessment on toxicity interaction among compounds.