Researchers from Sweden's Linköping University used a way to identify the proteins in the body that are impacted by toxins.
Fremont, CA: Pollutants are present in the water, the food, and the environment around us. In manufacturing, agriculture, industry, and customer goods, over 100,000 chemicals are utilized. They get in touch with chemicals that our bodies can absorb daily. Some of them can be dangerous to our health. Likewise, when some chemicals are coupled with others, they turn more dangerous than when they are alone, a phenomenon called the cocktail effect. Forecasting the effects of exposure to mixes of many distinct chemicals has been one of the hardest tasks in toxicology in the last decades. Pollutant levels are continually rising, and it is difficult to test these chemicals' effects.
Veronica Lizano-Fallas, a Ph.D. student at Linköping University's Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences (BKV), states testing combinations of compounds are extremely complex, and she believes that their technique will result in a more efficient use of time and money than conventional methods, which explore the effect on one biological process at a time.
The researchers stress that the technology they explain in an article published in the Journal of Proteomics can notice unwanted biological effects of chemicals at an initial phase. Other strategies can then be used to study these effects more deeply. Susana Cristobal, professor at BKV and study leader, says that chemicals interact with proteins in a rather promiscuous manner, and they often discover that the compounds they test affect many proteins. The study also notices that protein interactions with chemicals affect their functioning, consistent with the effects of pollutants and harmful compounds in the cell.
