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Observing the Human Exposome as Reflected in Breath Biomarkers: Heat Map Data Interpretation for Environmental and Intelligence Research
Citation:
PLEIL, J. D., M. A. Stiegel, J. SOBUS, Q. Liu, AND M. C. MADDEN. Observing the Human Exposome as Reflected in Breath Biomarkers: Heat Map Data Interpretation for Environmental and Intelligence Research. Journal of Breath Research. Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, Uk, 5(3):1-9, (2011).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA′s mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD′s research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA′s strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
Over the past decade, the research of human systems biology and the interactions with the external environment has permeated all phases of environmental, medical, and public health research. Similarly to the fields of genomics and proteomics research, the advent of new instrumentation for measuring breath biomarkers and their associated meta-data also provide very useful, albeit complex, data structures. The biomarker research community is beginning to invoke tools from systems biology to assess the impact of environmental exposures, as well as from internal health states, on the expression of suites of chemicals in exhaled breath. This new approach introduces the concept of the exposome as a complement to the genome in exploring the environment - gene interaction. In addition to answering questions regarding health status for the medical community, breath biomarker patterns are useful for assessing public health risks from environmental exposures. Furthermore, breath biomarker patterns can inform security risks from suspects via covert interrogation of blood borne chemical levels that reflect previous activities. This article discusses how different classes of exhaled breath biomarker measurements can be used to rapidly assess patterns in complex data. We present exhaled breath data sets to demonstrate the value of the graphical "heat map" approach for hypothesis development and subsequent guidance for stochastic and mixed effects data interpretation. We also show how to graphically interpret exhaled breath measurements of exogenous jet fuel components, as well as exhaled breath condensate (ESC) measurements of endogenous chemicals.
URLs/Downloads:
Journal of Breath Research
Observing the Human Exposome as Reflected in Breath Biomarkers: Heat Map Data Interpretation for Environmental and Intelligence Research (PDF, NA pp, 5337 KB, about PDF)