Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 50th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : June 19, 2023 - June 21, 2023
"Kanemi Yusho", which occurred in 1968, is the largest food pollution in Japan. It is still a major cause of disasters for the generation that ingested Kanemi rice oil. This was caused by the transformed PCB heated during the deodorization process into the highly poisonous polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), which was then introduced into rice bran oil. In recent years, similar diseases have been occurring at a high frequency in the second and third generations, and the "National Yusho Treatment Research Group" has started to investigate these diseases in the later generations. We hypothesized that "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance(TEI)" was involved in the transgenerational problem of "Kanemi Yusho" and started our own investigation. TEI is a phenomenon in which some toxic effects are observed even in generations not exposed to the causative agent, and is caused by the transmission of epigenetic modifications in germ cells. Based on these facts, we are now analyzing the specific disease in families of "Kanemi Yusho" and we plan to analyze epigenetics in the cells from these individuals in future. Nowadays, various toxicological evidences show that they are originated from epigenetic disturbance on somatic and/or germ cells. We must establish a "epigenetic toxicology” in future.
