Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA.
The Center for Research on Women and Children's Health, Child Health and Development Studies, Public Health Institute, 1683 Shattuck Avenue, Suite B, Berkeley, CA, 94709, USA.
Reprod Toxicol. 2020 Mar;92:57-65. doi: 10.1016/j.reprotox.2019.06.013. Epub 2019 Jul 9.
Even though the majority of population studies in environmental health focus on a single factor, environmental exposure in the real world is a mixture of many chemicals. The concept of "exposome" leads to an intellectual framework of measuring many exposures in humans, and the emerging metabolomics technology offers a means to read out both the biological activity and environmental impact in the same dataset. How to integrate exposome and metabolome in data analysis is still challenging. Here, we employ a hierarchical community network to investigate the global associations between the metabolome and mixed exposures including DDTs, PFASs and PCBs, in a women cohort with sera collected in California in the 1960s. Strikingly, this analysis revealed that the metabolite communities associated with the exposures were non-specific and shared among exposures. This suggests that a small number of metabolic phenotypes may account for the response to a large class of environmental chemicals.
尽管大多数环境健康人群研究都集中在单一因素上，但在现实世界中，环境暴露是多种化学物质的混合物。“暴露组学”的概念为测量人体中的许多暴露提供了一个智力框架，而新兴的代谢组学技术提供了一种在同一数据集中读取生物活性和环境影响的方法。如何在数据分析中整合暴露组学和代谢组学仍然具有挑战性。在这里，我们采用分层社区网络来研究代谢组学和包括滴滴涕、PFAS 和多氯联苯在内的混合暴露之间的全球关联，该研究队列为 20 世纪 60 年代在加利福尼亚采集血清的女性。引人注目的是，这项分析表明，与暴露相关的代谢物群落是非特异性的，并且在暴露中共享。这表明少数代谢表型可能解释了对一大类环境化学物质的反应。
