The chemical exposome in pregnant women and metabolic dysregulations analysis towards the prioritization of hazardous chemicals

Expo-IS-omics is an interdisciplinary and highly innovative project in the field of human exposomics and bioinformatics.

The main objective of EXPO-IS-OMICS is to obtain a holistic picture of both the external and internal chemical exposome in a large cohort of pregnant women to study which are the contaminants that can cause metabolic alterations.

Once we know which contaminants are having more effects, we will develop new cheminformatics tools, capable to predict the chemicals with potential to dysregulate human metabolism based on in-silico predicted molecular predictors. EXPO-IS-OMICS will analyse samples of blood and urine of >200 pregnant women residents in Greece from the Rhea Cohort.

This project will use state-of-the-art instrumentation to provide nontarget data at trace levels from a vast chemical domain, obtaining with the same data information of both contaminants presence (external chemical exposome) and specific alterations in the endogenous chemical profile (internal chemical exposome), by means of target, suspect, nontarget and metabolomics strategies.

EXPO-IS-OMICS will also be pioneer in developing cheminformatics tools to predict when a certain chemical may represent a problem to human health.

For the development of the tool, experimental data from this project will be joined with others cohorts results in which the applicant is currently involver and the principal investigators have agreed to share (e.g. BISC (https://www.projectebisc.org/) and Insulin (https://www.tecnatox.cat/list-of-projects)) for validation purposes.

The expert knowledge of fellow and host group gives the security to reach the ambitious objectives.