Endocrine Disruption

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

in a bottle. We can think of the body as a river, and a specific hormone may be a bottle containing a message. The organs or glands mentioned above would manufacture the “bottles” (hormones) that would be released into the river (blood stream). If there were no receptor sites for the hormones in the body, then they would continue to flow along the river and probably not make their destination. However, there are systems of receptor sites that enable specific hormones to bind in specific places. Structure also plays a major role in determining which hormones are able to bind to which receptors.
When these “messages in bottles” reach their appointed destination, the binding into the receptor site causes a cascade of reactions to occur. It is these reactions that are vital in maintaining our homeostasis. Many times the binding of the receptor site causes a direct expression of a certain gene. This is where endocrine disrupters can exert major ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

are not needed and could be very harmful.
Another suspected mechanism is that the endocrine disrupting chemicals are just blocking the function of the natural hormone. This is in contrast to the mechanism above, where the disrupters are actually binding in the site the hormones usually would. This mechanism would produce a lower level of cellular responses, opposite of the first mechanism. There are a few other mechanisms that are thought to occur, but the majority of those we have discovered thus far fall under one of the two described above.
We have defined endocrine disrupters and given their two possible modes of action, but why exactly are we concerned with them? Endocrine ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: