Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry Seminar: Strategies for expanding knowledge of the consumer chemical exposome

Strategies for expanding knowledge
of the consumer chemical exposome

Dr. Gaud DERVILLY

HDR, Oniris, INRAE, Deirectrice adj. UMR 1329 LABERCA,
(Nantes, France)

gaud.dervilly [at] oniris-nantes.fr

Long-term management of human health requires a comprehensive understanding of the environmental influences on it. In 2005, C. Wild (IARC) first proposed the concept of exposome, as it became clear that, in addition to genetic diseases, there is a wide and growing field of diseases of environmental and social origin, such as obesity. The exposome encompasses environmental exposures throughout life (including lifestyle factors) from the prenatal period. This new vision draws the attention of decision-makers to the need for comprehensive and high quality exposure data in order to investigate the causes of certain diseases in humans and thus to manage situations more effectively.

Diet is a significant source of human exposure to chemicals; whether of natural or synthetic origin, internationally or unintentionally produced, they constitute hazards that may enter the food chain at different levels, and, depending on their toxicity and levels of exposure, represent a risk to the consumer. While some substances have been well-known for decades (mycotoxins, heavy metals, dioxins, PCBs, PAHs, etc.), others have been identified more recently as a food-related risk, such as brominated flame retardants, perfluorinated compounds, etc. It is thus recognised that a considerable number of additional substances that may present a risk to human health are present in the food chain. Indeed, the total number of substances of concern of human or natural origin already assessed, regulated or monitored is small compared to the estimated 100,000 industrial chemicals in regular use. In addition, several hundred new chemicals are produced each year due to the rapid innovation taking place in the chemical industry or in relation to new processing trends. As awareness of the multitude of chemicals of potential interest has grown, research into the detection and characterisation of these contaminants has increased. Two strategies are deployed by laboratories to address this particular problem of detecting emerging contaminants in the food chain. The first focuses on substances that are already known or have recently been described, and aims to develop effective analytical approaches to objectively identify the presence of these contaminants in foodstuffs and measure their concentration levels in order to help characterise consumer exposure. The second of these approaches explores emergences in a more global manner by using research strategies based on particular chemical motifs (e.g. halogenated driven data processing), specific effects (e.g. involving metabolomics) or the modelling of probable structures. The innovative analytical strategies implemented in the framework of these two approaches will be detailed to illustrate the idenitifcation of emerging hazards in the food chain with the objective of expanding consumer chemical exposome knowledge.
 

For more information, contact stephane.bayen [at] mcgill.ca (Professor Stéphane Bayen)