Prediction for the mixture toxicity of six organophosphorus pesticides to the luminescent bacterium Q67

Organophosphorus (OP) pesticides are ubiquitous in the surface water as mixtures. To examine the mixture toxicity in the multi-component space, the uniform design (UD) which can explore the concentration changes with few experimental efforts was employed to design the mixtures. On the other hand, the fixed concentration ratio ray was applied into six UD mixtures and two equivalent-effect concentration mixtures to build the whole concentration–response curves to overcome the demerit of the classical “point-to-point” method. The experimental toxicities of six pesticides and their mixtures to the luminescent bacterium Q67 were determined. The mixture toxicities were predicted by two models, concentration addition (CA) and independent action (IA). The results showed that all the mixture toxicities observed had no significant differences from the ones predicted by CA. However, the mixture toxicities were also well predicted by IA especially at the low-concentration section.