Bioassay

[citation needed] Bioassays are essential in pharmaceutical, medical and agricultural sciences for development and launching of new drugs, vitamins, etc.

[8] His use of bioassay was able to discover that administration of gradually increasing dose of diphtheria in animals stimulated production of antiserum.

[10] To provide advance warning of dangerous levels of methane in the air, miners would take methane-sensitive canaries into coal mines.

If the canary died due to a build-up of methane, the miners would leave the area as quickly as possible.

[11] In 1915, Yamaigiwa Katsusaburo and Koichi Ichikawa tested the carcinogenicity of coal tar using the inner surface of rabbit's ears.

[11] From the 1940s to the 1960s, animal bioassays were primarily used to test the toxicity and safety of drugs, food additives, and pesticides.

The LD50 value, a common measure of acute toxicity, describes the dose at which a substance is lethal to 50% of tested animals.

[5] The methods involve exposing living aquatic organisms to samples of wastewater for a specific length of time.

[17][18] Another example is the bioassay ECOTOX, which uses the microalgae Euglena gracilis to test the toxicity of water samples.