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National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

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Your Environment. Your Health.

Publication Detail

Title: Utilizing a Biology-Driven Approach to Map the Exposome in Health and Disease: An Essential Investment to Drive the Next Generation of Environmental Discovery.

Authors: Chung, Ming Kei; Rappaport, Stephen M; Wheelock, Craig E; Nguyen, Vy Kim; van der Meer, Thomas P; Miller, Gary W; Vermeulen, Roel; Patel, Chirag J

Published In Environ Health Perspect, (2021 Aug)

Abstract: BACKGROUND: Recent developments in technologies have offered opportunities to measure the exposome with unprecedented accuracy and scale. However, because most investigations have targeted only a few exposures at a time, it is hypothesized that the majority of the environmental determinants of chronic diseases remain unknown. OBJECTIVES: We describe a functional exposome concept and explain how it can leverage existing bioassays and high-resolution mass spectrometry for exploratory study. We discuss how such an approach can address well-known barriers to interpret exposures and present a vision of next-generation exposomics. DISCUSSION: The exposome is vast. Instead of trying to capture all exposures, we can reduce the complexity by measuring the functional exposome-the totality of the biologically active exposures relevant to disease development-through coupling biochemical receptor-binding assays with affinity purification-mass spectrometry. We claim the idea of capturing exposures with functional biomolecules opens new opportunities to solve critical problems in exposomics, including low-dose detection, unknown annotations, and complex mixtures of exposures. Although novel, biology-based measurement can make use of the existing data processing and bioinformatics pipelines. The functional exposome concept also complements conventional targeted and untargeted approaches for understanding exposure-disease relationships. CONCLUSIONS: Although measurement technology has advanced, critical technological, analytical, and inferential barriers impede the detection of many environmental exposures relevant to chronic-disease etiology. Through biology-driven exposomics, it is possible to simultaneously scale up discovery of these causal environmental factors. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP8327.

PubMed ID: 34435882 Exiting the NIEHS site

MeSH Terms: Environmental Exposure/analysis; Environmental Health; Exposome*; Humans; Mass Spectrometry

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