Over the years, one of the issues in toxicology has been expecting the effects of exposure to mixtures of different chemicals.
FREMONT, CA: Researchers from LiU have applied a way to determine the proteins in the body affected by chemicals. The technique can determine whether a substance has biological influences on an organism.
Exceeding 100,000 chemicals are utilized in manufacturing, agriculture, industry, and customer articles. They exist in the water, the food, and the environment around us. Few of them can have side effects on our health. Still, a phenomenon called the “cocktail effect” is known.
Over the years, one of the issues in toxicology has been expecting the effects of exposure to mixtures of different chemicals.
“Levels of pollutants are continuously rising, and testing the effects of all chemicals is difficult. Moreover, it is hard to test mixtures of substances. I think that our technique can follow more efficient use of time and money than customary methods, which test the effects on one biological mechanism at a time”, says a student in the Division of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences.
Functions of proteins involved.
The researchers underscore that the way they detail in an article in the Journal of Proteomics can be utilized to notice, at an initial phase, unwanted biological effects of substances. These things can then be explored in more detail via other methods.
“Chemicals interact with proteins somewhat randomly, and we often find multiple proteins impacted by the substances we test. We notice that the operations of proteins are afflicted by their dealings with chemicals, which is compatible with the effects of pollutants and harmful substances in the cell”, states a professor in BKV who has led the study.
Researchers at LiU study how chemicals and pollutants interact with proteins to decide at an initial phase whether a chemical has biological impacts on an organism. They utilize mass spectrometry to find the specific proteins cooperating with the chemicals.
The new strategy applied by the LiU researchers is on the basis of a technique designed to study pharmaceuticals, proteome integral solubility modification, abbreviated as “PISA.” The researchers have experimented with how the method can determine the proteins from an organism that interact with pollutants and other chemicals. First, targeting to get proteins from all types of cells in an organism and its proteome, the researchers extracted proteins from zebrafish embryos. Then, they combined the proteome with one or many substances.
Environmental toxin impacted
The researchers have employed the method in four systems:
● An individual pollutant
● A mixture of chemicals
● A new bioactive substance
● Undesired effects of a new drug
They sampled, for example, the effects of a well-studied environmental toxin, TCDD, and determined many proteins affected by TCDD that were unfamiliar in previous studies. The outcomes demonstrate that studying the whole proteome of an organism with this process will let scientists find more possible molecular interactions between chemicals and proteins.
