An important but understudied class of human exposures is comprised of reactive electrophiles that cannot be measured in vivo because they are short lived. An avenue for assessing these meaningful exposures focuses on adducts from reactions with nucleophilic loci of blood proteins, particularly Cys34 of human serum albumin, which is the dominant scavenger of reactive electrophiles in serum. We developed an untargeted analytical scheme and bioinformatics pipeline for detecting, quantitating and annotating Cys34 adducts in tryptic digests of human serum/plasma. The pipeline interrogates tandem mass spectra to find signatures of the Cys34-containing peptide, obtains accurate masses of putative adducts, quantitates adduct levels relative to a ‘housekeeping peptide’, and annotates modifications based on a combination of retention time, accurate mass, elemental composition and database searches. We used the adductomics pipeline to characterize 43 adduct features in archived plasma from healthy human subjects and found several that were highly associated with smoking status, race and other covariates. Since smoking is a strong risk factor for cancer and cardiovascular disease, our ability to discover adducts that distinguish smokers from nonsmokers with untargeted adductomics indicates that the pipeline is suitable for use in epidemiologic studies. In fact, adduct features were both positively and negatively associated with smoking, indicating that some adducts arise from reactions between Cys34 and constituents of cigarette smoke (e.g. ethylene oxide and acrylonitrile) while others (Cys34 oxidation products and disulfides) appear to reflect alterations in the serum redox state that resulted in reduced adduct levels in smokers.

Highly diverse food-derived metabolites (the so-called food metabolome) can be characterized in human biospecimens through this powerful metabolomic approach and screened to identify novel biomarkers for dietary exposures, which are ultimately essential to better understand the role of the diet in the cause of chronic diseases.

Consumption of cruciferous vegetables (CVs) is inversely correlated to many human diseases including cancer (breast, lung, and bladder), diabetes, cardiovascular and neurological disease.Presently, there are no readily measureable biomarkers of CV consumption and intake of CVs has relied on dietary recall. Here, biomarkers of CV intake were identified in the urine of 20 healthy Caucasian adult males using 1 H-NMR spectroscopy with multivariate statistical modeling. The study was separated into three phases of 14 days: a run-in period with restricted CV consumption (phase I); a high CV phase where participants consumed 250g/day of both broccoli and Brussels sprouts (phase II); a wash-out phase with a return to restricted CV consumption (phase III). Each study participant provided a complete cumulative urine collection over 48 hours at the end of each phase; a spot urine (U0), 0-10 hours (U0-10), 10-24 hours (U10-24) and 24-48 hours (U24-48) urine samples. Urine samples obtained after consumption of CV were differentiated from low CV diet samples by 4 singlet 1 H-NMR spectroscopic peaks, two of which were identified as S-methyl-L-cysteine sulphoxide (SMCSO) and N-acetyl-Smethyl-L-cysteine sulphoxide (NAc-SMCSO). These stable urinary biomarkers of CV consumption will facilitate future assessment of CV in nutritional population screening and dietary intervention studies and may correlate to population health outcomes.

Xuanwei and Fuyuan counties in China have the highest lung cancer rates in the world due to household air pollution from combustion of smoky coal for cooking and heating. To discover potential biomarkers of indoor combustion products, we profiled adducts at the Cys34 locus of human serum albumin (HSA) in 29 nonsmoking Xuanwei and Fuyuan females who used smoky coal, smokeless coal or wood, and 10 local controls who used electricity or gas fuel. Our untargeted ‘adductomics’ method detected 50 tryptic peptides of HSA, containing Cys34 and prominent post-translational modifications. Putative adducts included Cys34 oxidation products, mixed disulfides, rearrangements and truncations. The most significant differences in adduct levels across fuel types were observed for S-glutathione (S-GSH) and S-γ-glutamylcysteine (S-γ-GluCys), both of which were present at lower levels in subjects exposed to combustion products than in controls. After adjustment for age and personal measurements of airborne benzo(a)pyrene, the largest reductions in levels of S-GSH and S-γ-GluCys relative to controls were observed for users of smoky coal, compared to users of smokeless coal and wood. These results point to possible depletion of GSH, an essential antioxidant, and its precursor γ-GluCys in nonsmoking females exposed to indoor-combustion products in Xuanwei and Fuyuan, China.

Although benzene has long been recognized as a cause of human leukemia, the mechanism by which this simple molecule causes cancer has been problematic. A complicating factor is benzene metabolism, which produces many reactive intermediates, some specific to benzene and others derived from redox processes. Using archived serum from 20 nonsmoking Chinese workers, 10 with and 10 without occupational exposure to benzene (exposed: 3.2-88.9 ppm, controls: 0.002-0.020 ppm), we employed an adductomic pipeline to characterize protein modifications at Cys34 of human serum albumin, a nucleophilic hotspot in extracellular fluids. Of the 47 measured human serum albumin modifications, 39 were present at higher concentrations in benzene-exposed workers than in controls and many of the exposed-control differences were statistically significant. Correlation analysis identified three prominent clusters of adducts, namely putative modifications by benzene oxide and a benzene diolepoxide that grouped with other measures of benzene exposure, adducts of reactive oxygen and carbonyl species, and Cys34 disulfides of small thiols that are formed following oxidation of Cys34. Benzene diolepoxides are potent mutagens and carcinogens that have received little attention as potential causes of human leukemia. Reactive oxygen and carbonyl species-generated by redox processes involving polyphenolic benzene metabolites and by Cyp2E1 regulation following benzene exposure-can modify DNA and proteins in ways that contribute to cancer. The fact that these diverse human serum albumin modifications differed between benzene-exposed and control workers suggests that benzene can increase leukemia risks via multiple pathways involving a constellation of reactive molecules.