The food additive EDTA aggravates colitis and colon carcinogenesis in mouse models.

Inflammatory bowel disease is a group of conditions with rising incidence caused by genetic and environmental factors including diet. The chelator ethylenediaminetetraacetate (EDTA) is widely used by the food and pharmaceutical industry among numerous other applications, leading to a considerable environmental exposure. Numerous safety studies in healthy animals have revealed no relevant toxicity by EDTA. Here we show that, in the presence of intestinal inflammation, EDTA is surprisingly capable of massively exacerbating inflammation and even inducing colorectal carcinogenesis at doses that are presumed to be safe. This toxicity is evident in two biologically different mouse models of inflammatory bowel disease, the AOM/DSS and the IL10-/- model. The mechanism of this effect may be attributed to disruption of intercellular contacts as demonstrated by in vivo confocal endomicroscopy, electron microscopy and cell culture studies. Our findings add EDTA to the list of food additives that might be detrimental in the presence of intestinal inflammation, but the toxicity of which may have been missed by regulatory safety testing procedures that utilize only healthy models. We conclude that the current use of EDTA especially in food and pharmaceuticals should be reconsidered. Moreover, we suggest that intestinal inflammatory models should be implemented in the testing of food additives to account for the exposure of this primary organ to environmental and dietary stress.

Ionic-content dependence of viscoelasticity of the lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal sunset yellow.

A lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) is an orientationally ordered system made by self-assembled aggregates of charged organic molecules in water, bound by weak noncovalent attractive forces and stabilized by electrostatic repulsions. We determine how the ionic content of the LCLC, namely, the presence of mono- and divalent salts and pH enhancing agent, alter the viscoelastic properties of the LCLC. Aqueous solutions of the dye sunset yellow with a uniaxial nematic order are used as an example. By applying a magnetic field to impose orientational deformations, we measure the splay K1, twist K2, and bend K3 elastic constants and rotation viscosity γ1 as a function of concentration of additives. The data indicate that the viscoelastic parameters are influenced by ionic content in dramatic and versatile ways. For example, the monovalent salt NaCl decreases K3 and K2 and increases γ1, while an elevated pH decreases all the parameters. We attribute these features to the ion-induced changes in length and flexibility of building units of LCLC, the chromonic aggregates, a property not found in conventional thermotropic and lyotropic liquid crystals formed by covalently bound units of fixed length.