Towards a comprehensive characterisation of the human internal chemical exposome: Challenges and perspectives

Exposome-wide Association Study for Metabolic Syndrome

“…Furthermore, utilizing the exposomics approach to reveal unknown environmental factors that cause MetS and EWAS to prioritize all the MetS-related environmental factors would be promising to provide the testable hypotheses for experimental validations ( Gao et al, 2021 ). Nevertheless, the technical barriers in multi-omics and exposomics research do exist, such as the technological challenges on chemical and biological agents identifications ( David et al, 2021 ), the bioinformatics challenges related to the computational throughput and workflows, and the high financial costs of such exposomics cohort study. Fortunately, the results from current large environmental health studies and exposomics related international consortiums including the Global Exposome Harmonization project and others such as the HELIX project provided some insights for future research ( Stratakis et al, 2020 ; Maitre et al, 2021 ).…”

Merging the exposome into an integrated framework for “omics” sciences

“…Each –ome, including the metabolome, operates in the continuum of endogenous-xenobiotic processes ( Nicholson and Wilson, 2003 ) and externally derived chemicals are constituents of the metabolome ( Athersuch and Keun, 2015 ). Yet, a separate term is beneficial to convey the differing perspectives regarding the subsequent interpretation and raises awareness of the specific challenges faced to profile endogenous or exogenous components ( David et al., 2021 ). As such, we propose: Internal chemical exposome: the totality of internal contact between environmentally derived chemicals (chemical agents including biotransformation products) and a biological entity.…”

IDSL.CCDB: a database for exploring inter-chemical correlations in metabolomics and exposomics datasets

“…A systematic understanding and cataloging of targeted and untargeted analyses of small molecules measured in biospecimens is needed, as such datasets are critical to translate the information gathered from exposomics and metabolomics projects 20 . These key datasets include: 1) population-scale biomonitoring surveys; 2) targeted analysis of multiple analytes in hypothesis-driven studies (typically 10-100); and 3) untargeted analysis of thousands of chemicals using a high-resolution mass spectrometry instrument 21, 22 . They cover key high priority exposome chemicals 23 including carcinogens 24, 25 , endocrine disrupters 26 and industry chemicals 27 .…”