Read the full article by XiaoZhi Lim (C&EN)
“The environmental research community widely accepts trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) as the most abundant per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) in the environment, although the US Environmental Protection Agency does not recognize it as a PFAS. Precursors such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and refrigerants break down into TFA, and the molecule is also sometimes used directly as a chemical reagent. While a large-scale research effort in the 1990s established that TFA exerts minimal acute toxic effects, little is known about TFA’s long-term effects on more-sensitive biological functions.
Now new research in human endothelial cells indicates that TFA can impair blood vessel development (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2026, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6c06569). It can interfere with how endothelial cells produce energy, which they need to maintain and grow new blood vessels.
A team of researchers led by Yanhong Wei of Sun Yat-sen University and Xifei Yang at the Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention exposed cultures of endothelial cells to TFA at concentrations spanning 0.8–2,000 µg/L. The lowest dose of TFA—0.8 µg/L—reduced the concentrations of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) within cells by 7% compared with those in cells that were not exposed to TFA. For the most part, ATP concentrations dropped even further with higher doses of TFA: for instance, by 26% in cells exposed to 2 µg/L TFA and 45% with 200 µg/L TFA. But at 2,000 µg/L, ATP concentrations dropped only 43%.”…