Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

The "exposome" encompasses the totality of environmental exposure during the course of a lifetime. Environmental exposures are widely acknowledged to play an integral role in chronic disease, but many exposure-disease associations remain ambiguously defined at best. In chemistry and chemical biology, nongenetic risk factors manifest as endogenous and exogenous chemicals that result from lifestyle, diet, radiation, stress and exposure to environmental pollutants. In contrast with the genome, the exposome is variable and thus requires reliable measurements of exposures that evolve over time. There is an urgent need for new analytical tools that will enable frequent, cost-effective and minimally invasive exposure measurements, most appropriately obtained from small quantities of blood (e.g. dried blood spots). However, the obstacles to further research in this field are formidable: The identities of most environmental toxicants and their role in causing chronic disease are unknown; and c. 90% of unknown environmental pollutants in a drop of blood are not detectable using existing analytical platforms. A flow modulator is proposed to address these challenges; support novel research in environmental and analytical chemistry; and increase interdisciplinary collaboration in research and HQP training, while making otherwise cost-prohibitive research accessible inhouse. The requested infrastructure is an integrated system that consists of a thermal desorption inlet to enable pollutant analysis in large numbers of samples of small quantities of blood; a flow modulator to enable enhanced separation of complex environmental and biological mixtures; and an autosampler to enable unattended analysis of samples. The device will enable frequent, non-invasive and cost effective measurements using dried blood spots (DBS). The instrumentation will also serve the dual purposes of first, enabling groundbreaking research in analytical chemistry, separation science and environmental health; and secondly, support training for the next generation of environmental analytical chemists in Canada.