Ways to indicate unwanted Biological Effects of Chemicals

Researchers from LiU have applied a method to identify the proteins in the body affected by chemicals. The technique can discover whether a substance has biological effects on an organism early.

They’re in the water, the food we drink, and the environment around us. More than 100,000 chemicals are employed in manufacturing, agriculture, industry, and consumer articles. Few of them can have adverse effects on our health. However, a phenomenon is known as the “cocktail effect” is known.

In late decades, one of the challenges in toxicology has been predicting the effects of exposure to mixtures of various chemicals.

“Levels of pollutants are constantly increasing, and it is challenging to test the effects of all chemicals. In addition, it is challenging to test mixtures of substances. I believe that our technique can lead to more efficient use of time and money than conventional methods, which test the effects on one biological mechanism at a time”, says a learner in the Division of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences.

Functions of proteins affected.

The researchers emphasize that the way they detail in an article in the Journal of Proteomics can be employed to detect, at an early stage, unwanted biological effects of substances. These things can then be studied in more detail through other methods.

“Chemicals interface with proteins fairly promiscuously, and we frequently find that numerous proteins are affected by the substances we test. We see that the operations of proteins are afflicted by their interactions with chemicals, which is consistent with the effects of pollutants and damaging substances in the cell”, says a professor in BKV who has led the study.

Researchers at LiU investigate how chemicals and pollutants interface with proteins to determine at an early stage whether a chemical has biological effects on an organism. They employ mass spectrometry to find the specific proteins interacting with the chemicals.

The new method applied by the LiU researchers is based on a technique developed to study pharmaceuticals, proteome integral solubility alteration, shortened as “PISA.” The researchers have tested how the method can identify the proteins from an organism that interact with pollutants and other chemicals. First, targeting to obtain proteins from all types of cells in an organism and its proteome, the researchers extracted proteins from zebrafish embryos. Then, they blended the proteome with one or several substances.

Environmental toxin affected

The researchers have used the method in four scenarios:

● An individual pollutant

● A mixture of chemicals

● A new bioactive substance

● Undesired effects of a new drug

They tested, for instance, the effects of a well-studied environmental toxin, TCDD, and determined several proteins affected by TCDD that were unknown in previous studies. The results indicate that studying the complete proteome of an organism with this method will allow scientists to find more likely molecular interactions between chemicals and proteins.