You are here:
A Novel Method for Nontargeted Analysis of Glucuronides in Biofluids as Indicators of Exposure to Environmental Contaminants
Citation:
Mosley, J., M. Evich, AND D. Ekman. A Novel Method for Nontargeted Analysis of Glucuronides in Biofluids as Indicators of Exposure to Environmental Contaminants. 2018 SETAC NA Annual Meeting, Sacramento, CA, November 04 - 08, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Poster presentation at 2018 SETAC NA Meeting in Sacramento.
Description:
Aquatic species (e.g., fish) can be negatively impacted by exposure to mixtures of environmental contaminants. It is becoming increasingly common either to investigate the biological impacts of exposure to these complex mixtures on these species (e.g., with metabolomics) or to monitor environmental contaminants present in the mixtures. Conventional monitoring can be performed for a suite of known contaminants, providing exposure levels for chemicals of known toxicity while non-targeted analyses on environmental samples can reveal many hundreds of previously unknown contaminants. However, just because a xenobiotic is present in an environmental matrix does not make it bioavailable, and thus potentially harmful, to fish. For many xenobiotics glucuronidation is the major metabolic pathway of detoxification, providing an intersection between monitoring biological impacts with metabolomics and environmental exposure (e.g., non-targeted analyses). Furthermore, there is a rich history of quantification methods for glucuronides within biological samples, usually involving separation by liquid chromatography (LC) followed by detection with some variation of mass spectrometry. Recent developments in high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) provide many advantages, and some disadvantages, for detecting glucuronides of environmental contaminants in aquatic species. Two major challenges facing non-targeted LC-HRMS analyses for this application are: 1) annotation of the many thousands of detected features in a sample, whether the sample is biological or environmental in nature; and 2) identifying which features are relevant to an exposure involving a complex mixture of chemicals. Together, these can greatly complicate non-targeted analyses and decrease confidence in the identities of detected contaminants. Thus, we have developed a novel method that utilizes the advantages from both traditional enzyme hydrolysis-based sample preparation techniques and non-targeted LC-HRMS analyses to enable the rapid detection and identification of potentially harmful xenobiotics in biological samples.
