You are doing an internship at a branch office of the Food and Drug Administration and are investigating the effects of a potentially dangerous food product

You are doing an internship at a branch office of the Food and Drug Administration and are investigating the effects of a potentially dangerous food product. There are allegations that the food product contains a substance that disrupts the endocrine system. To test the claim, you and your   supervisor run an experiment where you feed the food product to a group of lab rats and perform a blood panel to measure the concentration of different hormones in the blood.

Table 1. Various hormone concentrations measured in male rats that consumed the food product.  

You and your supervisor suspect that the abnormal values you observed in the table above are due to a chemical in the food product. Upon further chemical analysis, you learn that the chemical mimics the function of an endogenous hormone (i.e., has the same effect as a naturally produced hormone). Note that this chemical is NOT detected by the blood panel above. In other words, the blood panel results only show endogenous hormone, concentrations.

Draw and upload a feedback loop of the affected hormones and relevant organs using the appropriate symbols and notations.

1. In your diagram, include the mystery chemical found in the food source and show how it affects other components in the feedback loop, using appropriate symbols and notations.

2. You may also provide a brief explanation to accompany your feedback loop, if necessary.

Note: Feedback loops with inappropriate symbols and/or notations will not be able to receive full credit for this question.