Exposure Assessment of Emerging Chemicals and Novel Screening Strategies

Abstract

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) commonly exist in various kinds of environmental mediums and can migrant into plant food sources and bioaccumulate in the fatty tissues of human body. Traditional approach to evaluate POPs in multiple biofluids is based on targeted analytic chemistry. Recently, the development of sophisticated analytical instruments (e.g., tandem mass spectrometry, MS–MS) has provided the opportunity to quantify and identify chemical compounds to achieve good sensitivity and selectivity. In this chapter, we discuss the current assessment tools of chemical pollutants, including classic targeted approaches and novel untargeted methods. Targeted biomonitoring studies typically focused on a specific group of interest chemicals such as phthalate, bisphenol A (BPA), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). Recent studies tended to use noninvasive or less-invasive bio-matrices which could be accessible in sufficient amounts for the analysis and do not pose a health risk for the donor. There does not exist an ideal matrix for universal situations, but depending on the toxicokinetic of the targeted chemical. Exposome includes a series of quantitative and repeated metrics of both endogenous and exogenous exposures that describe, holistically, environmental influences or exposure over a lifetime. At the current stage, the exposome is still in its infancy. Many technical and statistical challenges remain unsolved. Combined with data mining, via a series of statistical approaches, exposome shows great potential in identifying markers that can further lead to targeted analyses.