Determination of Lethal Concentrations Using an R Software Function Integrating the Abbott Correction

Abstract

Several thousands of chemical substances are registered every year for different purposes, and sometimes many of them are claimed to play the same role. To establish and compare their toxicities, the determination of the lethal concentrations is usually necessary and should account for natural mortality. However, many of the statistical software packages used for that purpose do not readily integrate control mortality or adjust the best link function to the data during the process. This manuscript proposes an " lc " function in the R open source that aims at the effective determination of lethal concentrations. Furthermore, it performs the procedure with the appropriate link function. The " lc " application on the example provided revealed that the complementary log link function is adequate.