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Assessing chemical exposure and ecological impacts of environmental surface waters using cell culture-based metabolomic
Citation:
Teng, Q., W. Wang, H. Zhen, D. Ekman, Dan Villeneuve, J. Cavallin, G. Ankley, P. Bradley, AND Tim Collette. Assessing chemical exposure and ecological impacts of environmental surface waters using cell culture-based metabolomic. 2017 SETAC North America Annual Meeting, MN, Minneapolis, November 12 - 16, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Presented at SETAC North America 38th Annual Meeting for the session, Great Lakes Restoration Initiative: Occurrence and Effects of Contaminants of Emerging Concern.
Description:
Waste water treatment plants (WWTPs), as well as industrial and agricultural operations release complex mixtures of anthropogenic chemicals that negatively affect surface water quality. Previous studies have shown that exposure to such complex chemical mixtures can produce adverse health effects in resident organisms. Traditional methods using live animals (e.g., fish) for monitoring and assessing contaminant exposure and impacts in affected ecosystems are both resource and time intensive and thus often impractical for screening large numbers of impacted sites. Cell culture-based metabolomics has the ability to rapidly assess environmental impacts produced by such exposures and to investigate the components of contaminant mixtures that are likely responsible for those impacts. In this study, we applied cell-based metabolomics to detect biological impacts of environmental surface waters collected from 38 stream sites across the U.S. Zebrafish liver cells (ZFL) and two human cell lines (HepG2 and LN229) were exposed to media prepared with surface water samples for 48h. Intracellular, polar metabolites of all three cell lines were detected using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and high-resolution liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (HR LC-MS). The biochemical pathways most impacted by the exposures were determined based on relative changes in the levels of metabolites across the sites. Here we report the methodology used to identify these pathways as well as a comparison of responses across all 38 streams.
