Systematic proteomic approach to characterize the impacts of chemical interactions on protein and cytotoxicity responses to metal mixture exposures.

Chemical interactions have posed a big challenge in toxicity characterization and human health risk assessment of environmental mixtures. To characterize the impacts of chemical interactions on protein and cytotoxicity responses to environmental mixtures, we established a systems biology approach integrating proteomics, bioinformatics, statistics, and computational toxicology to measure expression or phosphorylation levels of 21 critical toxicity pathway regulators and 445 downstream proteins in human BEAS-2B cells treated with 4 concentrations of nickel, 2 concentrations each of cadmium and chromium, as well as 12 defined binary and 8 defined ternary mixtures of these metals in vitro. Multivariate statistical analysis and mathematical modeling of the metal-mediated proteomic response patterns showed a high correlation between changes in protein expression or phosphorylation and cellular toxic responses to both individual metals and metal mixtures. Of the identified correlated proteins, only a small set of proteins including HIF-1α is likely to be responsible for selective cytotoxic responses to different metals and metals mixtures. Furthermore, support vector machine learning was utilized to computationally predict protein responses to uncharacterized metal mixtures using experimentally generated protein response profiles corresponding to known metal mixtures. This study provides a novel proteomic approach for characterization and prediction of toxicities of metal and other chemical mixtures.

Cross-species sensitivity to a novel androgen receptor agonist of potential environmental concern, spironolactone.

Spironolactone is a pharmaceutical that in humans is used to treat conditions like hirsutism, various dermatologic afflictions, and female-pattern hair loss through antagonism of the androgen receptor. Although not routinely monitored in the environment, spironolactone has been detected downstream of a pharmaceutical manufacturer, indicating a potential for exposure of aquatic species. Furthermore, spironolactone has been reported to cause masculinization of female western mosquitofish, a response indicative of androgen receptor activation. Predictive methods to identify homologous proteins to the human and western mosquitofish androgen receptor suggest that vertebrates would be more susceptible to adverse effects mediated by chemicals like spironolactone that target the androgen receptor compared with invertebrate species that lack a relevant homolog. In addition, an adverse outcome pathway previously developed for activation of the androgen receptor suggests that androgen mimics can lead to reproductive toxicity in fish. To assess this, 21-d reproduction studies were conducted with 2 fish species, fathead minnow and Japanese medaka, and the invertebrate Daphnia magna. Spironolactone significantly reduced the fecundity of medaka and fathead minnows at 50 µg/L, whereas daphnia reproduction was not affected by concentrations as large as 500 µg/L. Phenotypic masculinization of females of both fish species was observed at 5 µg/L as evidenced by formation of tubercles in fathead minnows and papillary processes in Japanese medaka. Effects in fish occurred at concentrations below those reported in the environment. These results demonstrate how a priori knowledge of an adverse outcome pathway and the conservation of a key molecular target across vertebrates can be utilized to identify potential chemicals of concern in terms of monitoring and highlight potentially sensitive species and endpoints for testing.