Multi-user equipment approved in grant 2018/24069-3: Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS)

Abstract

In everyday life man is exposed to a large number of compounds coming from different sources (diet, environment, the use of drugs), some are essential and others harmful to life. Most of them interact with each other and with our organism, directly or indirectly, promoting simultaneous, dynamic and complex reactions of attack and defense. This process stimulates the formation of many molecules in the human body that sustains intimate relation with the health of an individual. Also, throughout the life, this process can be modified several times, due to the dynamic change of our environment or lifestyle (ex. stress, diet modification, smoke, altered sleep, noise, physical activity, pollution), which may lead to a higher predisposition to specific pathologies. It should also be noted that these uncertain environment variables (lifestyle/diet/pollution) may anticipate specific adverse effects in some individuals due to individual genetic variations in the genome (SNPs for example) or by direct interaction with DNA (epigenome). Consequently, studies on the adverse effects of human exposure to environmental contaminants only based on the exposure relationships-effect for a single or few substances, without considering lifestyle variables are very restricted. In this sense, a new vision to investigate the relationship between environmental exposure and linked effects, that considerably expand the concept of exposure to an overall set of external (e.g., diet, supplements, water, air, drugs, social events) and internal sources (e.g., expression of proteins or generated metabolites) and defined as the exposome has been proposed. Thus, the science of exposure advanced on an Environment-Wide Association Perspective, which should exhibit a much stronger relationship with the health and disease conditions of an individual (phenotype). Thus, this project aims to establish and apply the innovative perception of exposome in Brazil (based on Environment-Wide Association Studies and Environment-Genome-Wide Association Studies). Six different plans that contemplate cross-sectional population studies: (i) pregnant; (ii)-amazomics; (iii)-cardiogenes e (iv)-obese; (v)-micropest; (vi)-metropolis are proposed as the proof-of-concept. With this in mind, patterns or profiles associated with outcomes (biomarkers of effect or specific diseases) in different Brazilian populations will be established. Thus, data obtained on the levels of toxic substances and nutrients in the body, habits, and lifestyles (diet, physical activity, stress), genomic, epigenomic, proteomic and metabolomic profiles, as well as the microbiome will be integrated by applying supervised or unsupervised data mining tools. As additional goals, the present proposal will consolidate a Brazilian research networking in human biomonitoring and exposome studies, contributing to the formation of high-quality human resources. On the other hand, the data obtained may evidence populations at risk (high exposure to contaminants and deficiency of nutrients) to public policy actions and establish molecular mechanisms that can be used to prevent (predict) future health problems. Finally, with the constant technological development (internet of things, IoT) and increasing use of smartphones and point-of-care systems, new intelligent apps for generating individualized external exposure data and miniaturized detection systems for biomarkers (internal exposure) can be developed, which will stimulate startup proposals (future PIPE-FAPESP projects). (AU)