Metabolomics: a sensitive approach to unravel the exposome fingerprint

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Background

The development of the exposome concept has been one of the hallmarks of environmental and health research in the 21st Century. The exposome encompasses the life course environmental exposures (including pollutants, lifestyle factors and behaviors) from the prenatal period onwards, that can affect structure, physiology and metabolism of an individual, causing potential adverse, often permanent, health effects at any point in life. Linking such exposures to adverse outcomes and consequently to a specific diseases/adverse effects, via intermediate phenotypes such as the metabolome, is one of the central themes of exposome research. To date, work on the exposome almost exclusively targets human health issues and only recently, the integration of exposome and One Health concepts was noted. The demand for multidisciplinary research to meet today’s complex environment and human health challenges is urgent. Investigating the effects of multiple stressors across multiple species within the concepts of the exposome and One Health ensures that health problems are evaluated thoroughly and holistically. This win–win approach allows us to know the chemical and biological stressors more systemically and the issues and potential solutions are more comprehensively assessed.

Although the number of metabolomic studies associated with exposome research is increasing, their overall number is still very limited, providing information mainly only on specific chemical groups, ignoring the role of combined exposures as a mixture of multiple chemicals. Furthermore, many of these studies use a small number of individuals, doses that not reflect the true environmental concentrations and analytical methods with a limited coverage of the metabolome. Given the active research in the exposome field, I believe that this Research Topic will bring many answers to address the aforementioned challenges. These advances will have the potential to open up new horizons of investigation related to the study of the impact of real-world chemical exposures on human/animal health and to a more accurate assessment of chemical safety. It is also important to emphasize that the understanding of early molecular events throughout exposure-disease will provide valuable information that can be used to develop intervention and prevention strategies.

This Research Topic will be dedicated to metabolomics or metabolomics branches applications (e.g., lipidomics, volatilomics, fluxomics) in the field of exposome research.

The Research Topic will include:
• Targeted and untargeted metabolomic approaches
• Protocols development for assessing exposome fingerprinting
• Characterization of human or animal health effects derived from environmental exposures using metabolomic approaches
• Mapping pathways related to environmental exposures
• Construction of models to evaluate and predict environmental health
• Determination of biomarkers of exposure, disease progression and susceptibility factors
• Discussion of future directions of metabolomics applied to exposome research

Manuscripts that address other challenging issues in this field, including software tools and databases, novel statistical approaches, application of machine learning algorithms or combination with other -omics, are also of interest for this Research Topic. Original research articles, reviews, perspectives and commentaries on these topics will be accepted and will be of great value to all researchers working in this field.

Keywords: Metabolomics, Exposome, Environmental Health, Toxicology, Multi-stressers

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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