Analysis of university workplace building surfaces reveals usage-specific chemical signatures

McCall, Laura-Isobel; Anderson, Victoria M; Fogle, Robert S.; Haffner, Jacob J.; Hossain, Ekram; Liu, Renmeng; Ly, Anita H.; Nadeem, Maham; Yao, Songyuan

doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2019.106289

Cited by 8 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…These are likely to represent runoff from activities specific to the corresponding household, or to each household's specific gardening practices. As such, they may represent a fingerprint of household behavior, reminiscent of prior metabolomics studies of the built environment [30][31][32].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Maps were generated in R using packages muRL, zipcode, ggplot2, mapproj, viridis and RColorBrewer [44]. Random forest analysis was implemented as in our prior work [30], in R using the package randomForest, with 1000 trees and correction for unequal group sizes (see Jupyter Notebook on GitHub at https: //github.com/mccall-lab-OU/soils for code details).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Local Phenomena Shape Backyard Soil Metabolite Composition

et al. 2020

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Soil covers most of Earth’s continental surface and is fundamental to life-sustaining processes such as agriculture. Given its rich biodiversity, soil is also a major source for natural product drug discovery from soil microorganisms. However, the study of the soil small molecule profile has been challenging due to the complexity and heterogeneity of this matrix. In this study, we implemented high-resolution liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry and large-scale data analysis tools such as molecular networking to characterize the relative contributions of city, state and regional processes on backyard soil metabolite composition, in 188 soil samples collected from 14 USA States, representing five USA climate regions. We observed that region, state and city of collection all influence the overall soil metabolite profile. However, many metabolites were only detected in unique sites, indicating that uniquely local phenomena also influence the backyard soil environment, with both human-derived and naturally-produced (plant-derived, microbially-derived) metabolites identified. Overall, these findings are helping to define the processes that shape the backyard soil metabolite composition, while also highlighting the need for expanded metabolomic studies of this complex environment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local Phenomena Shape Backyard Soil Metabolite Composition

et al. 2020

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“…Aspects of your behavior, your practices, your biology, are not only impacting the metabolome in your body, but the metabolites you leave behind. Your metabolome can be characterized from your kitchen or bedroom, your keyboard at home or work (Bouslimani et al, ; Bouslimani et al, ;McCall et al, ; Petras et al, ). Indeed, metabolites left on phones can be used to build a behavioral profile of the phones' owner, and even to match them back together (Bouslimani et al, ).…”

Section: Elsi and The Metabolomementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Metabolomics is poised to make significant contributions to this area of research (Athersuch, ), but not without some major concerns for privacy, misinterpretation, and misuse of results. Visualizations of the molecules of the built environment not only reveal an individual's contact with their habitat, and the habitat's impact on the individual, but also the diffusion of a chemical material culture within the habitat, such as sanitizers, medication, personal care products, foods, drinks, and their additives (McCall et al, ; Petras et al, ). The chemical tracing of behavior, from the individual's behaviors to the history of an item, has major implications for a range of sciences, and certainly for ethics.…”

Section: Elsi and The Metabolomementioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical priority of the most actionable system of biomolecules: the metabolome

Lewis

McCall

Spicer

2019

American J Phys Anthropol

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The metabolome is a system of small biomolecules (metabolites) and a direct result of human bioculture. Consequently, metabolomics is well poised to impact anthropological and biomedical research for the foreseeable future. Overall, we provide a perspective on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of metabolomics, which we argue are often more alarming than those of genomics. Given the current mechanisms to fund research, ELSI beyond human DNA is stifled and in need of considerable attention.

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“…However, our prior work has shown traces of laboratory chemicals outside of the research space 3a and shared chemical signatures for research and mixed-use buildings compared to single-purpose office buildings. 4 Given the importance of dose in chemical effect, there is therefore a strong need to quantitatively assess chemical recovery from surfaces. This data will pave the way for improved analyses of chemical skin exposure risks, for example, to determine whether all building occupants or visitors are at health risk, and not just those handling the hazardous chemicals.…”

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confidence: 99%

Enabling Quantitative Analysis of Surface Small Molecules for Exposomics and Behavioral Studies

Katemauswa

Hossain

Liu

et al. 2022

J. Am. Soc. Mass Spectrom.

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Workplace chemical exposures are a major source of occupational injury. Although over half of these are skin exposures, exposomics research often focuses on chemical levels in the air or in worker biofluids such as blood and urine. Until now, one limitation has been the lack of methods to quantitatively measure surface chemical transfer. Outside the realm of harmful chemicals, the small molecules we leave behind on surfaces can also reveal important aspects of human behavior. In this study, we developed a swab-based quantitative approach to determine small molecule concentrations across common surfaces. We demonstrate its utility using one drug, cyclobenzaprine, on metal surfaces, and two human-derived metabolites, carnitine and phenylacetylglutamine, on four common surfaces: linoleum flooring, plastified laboratory workbench, metal, and Plexiglas. We observed peak areas proportional to surface analyte concentrations at 45 min and 1 week after deposition, enabling quantification of molecule abundance on workplace built environment surfaces. In contrast, this method was unsuitable for analysis of oleanolic acid, for which we did not observe a strong linear proportional relationship following swab-based recovery from surfaces. Overall, this method paves the way for future quantitative exposomics studies in analyte-specific and surface-specific frameworks.

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Analysis of university workplace building surfaces reveals usage-specific chemical signatures

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

Local Phenomena Shape Backyard Soil Metabolite Composition

Local Phenomena Shape Backyard Soil Metabolite Composition

Ethical priority of the most actionable system of biomolecules: the metabolome

Enabling Quantitative Analysis of Surface Small Molecules for Exposomics and Behavioral Studies

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