You are here:
Report: New analytical and statistical approaches for interpreting the relationships among environmental stressors and biomarkers
Citation:
Bean, H., J. Pleil, AND J. Hill. Report: New analytical and statistical approaches for interpreting the relationships among environmental stressors and biomarkers. BIOMARKERS. Taylor & Francis, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 20(1):1-4, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory’s (NERL’s) 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:
The broad topic of biomarker research has an often-overlooked component: the documentation and interpretation of the surrounding chemical environment and other meta-data, especially from visualization, analytical, and statistical perspectives (Pleil et al. 2014; Sobus et al. 2011; Pleil et al. 2011). A second concern is how the environment interacts with human systems biology, what the variability is in “normal” subjects, and how such biological observations might be reconstructed to infer external stressors (Sobus et al. 2010; Pleil and Sheldon 2011; Pleil 2009; Tan et al. 2012; Zhu et al. 2013a; Bean et al. 2014a). In this article, we report on an eclectic collection of recent research presentations from a symposium at the 248th American Chemical Society meeting held in San Francisco, August 10 - 14, 2014, that focused on providing some insight into these important issues, particularly, approaches and impacts on our understanding of biomarker data. The symposium, organized by the authors of this report, was comprised of both posters and platform presentations. The intent of this symposium was to address the observation that many of the novel scientific approaches being used to explore the effects of environmental stressors on human health and well-being are creating information faster than can be properly analyzed across studies. In order to reach a broad ACS audience, a call was sent out entitled “Monitoring and evaluating environmental exposures: Scientific case studies incorporating statistical approaches to evaluate and predict from large and fuzzy data sets,” with a focus on evaluating data that could be used to assess the ultimate pathways from the environment to internal dose and allowing for more specific case studies that would reflect current research trends. The selected presentations included environmental measurement studies delineating exposures as well as studies linking biological measurements to an environmental source. In aggregate, these presentations served the purpose of answering different questions regarding the human exposome, which is directly impacted by the interaction with the environment (Rappaport and Smith 2010, Pleil 2012). Here, we describe the major concepts explored in the presentations and put them into a common framework for informing the overall field of biomarker analysis.
