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EPA’s research initiatives on non-targeted analyses of environmental chemicals
Citation:
Sobus, J., E. Ulrich, J. Grossman, A. Chao, S. Newton, A. Williams, A. Richard, Chris Grulke, A. McEachran, R. Singh, H. Al-Ghoul, AND L. Groff. EPA’s research initiatives on non-targeted analyses of environmental chemicals. American Chemical Society Fall 2020 Annual Meeting & Expo (Virtual), San Francisco, California, August 17 - 20, 2020. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.13157471
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation will describe how non-targeted analysis is being implemented at the US EPA to support rapid assessments of chemical safety. The presentation will cover developments in databases, informatics, and software tools, as well as applications for the analysis of various environmental and biological media. It will further describe developments with EPA's Non-Targeted Analysis Collaborative Trial (ENTAC), an effort involving 30 labs around the globe to assess and harmonize NTA strategies and protocols.
Description:
Thousands of chemicals are present in the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat, and materials we encounter. Routine environmental and biological monitoring has been performed on <1% of these known compounds, owing to the exclusive use of targeted analytical methods, particularly in state and federal laboratories where emphasis is on regulatory monitoring. The immense paucity of human and ecological exposure data has underscored a need for higher-throughput monitoring methods, capable of identifying emerging contaminants and mapping chemical exposure trends on local, regional, national, and global scales. To address this need, the U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development has developed a research program oriented towards advancing non-targeted analysis (NTA) methods. The program includes three primary research components. The first component focuses on developing and integrating models and informatics tools to support NTA applications. The second component focuses on the specific applications of models and tools towards charactering emerging contaminants in high-priority media. The third component focuses on the evaluation of existing or novel NTA methods via an international collaborative study, known as “EPA’s Non-Targeted Analysis Collaborative Trial” (ENTACT). This presentation will highlight: 1) results of a cross-laboratory performance evaluation using the latest findings from ENTACT (including true positive and false negative rates for individual labs); 2) novel modeling approaches being used by ORD to prioritize tentatively identified emerging contaminants based on anticipated health risk; and 3) a web application (i.e., the “EPA NTA WebApp”) developed by ORD to enable widespread utilization of EPA data, models, and workflows. Example WebApp output will be shown, with input data based on recent analyses of environmental (e.g., drinking water) and human biological (e.g., placenta) specimens. The collective efforts described here are moving the exposure and health science communities towards improved speed, expanded coverage, and reduced uncertainty in chemical safety assessments. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the policies of the US EPA.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: EPA’s research initiatives on non-targeted analyses of environmental chemicals
SOBUS_ACS_2020_V2.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 4301.163 KB, about PDF)