Saliva and Exhaled Breath Condensate Correlate With Serum in 4-12-Year-Olds Exposed to Secondhand Electronic Cigarette Vapors: A Pilot Study.

Electronic cigarette use is highest among adults of child-bearing age. Many parents that use electronic cigarettes believe that secondhand exposure of electronic cigarette vapors for their children is not dangerous and is less harmful than secondhand exposure to traditional cigarette smoke. These beliefs may prompt excessive secondhand exposure to electronic cigarette vapors for their children. Little research has been done to document exposure in children. The traditional biological method of exposure detection is through a blood draw, which is difficult and undesirable in children. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of using saliva and exhaled breath condensate as non-invasive biomatrices for detecting secondhand electronic cigarette vapor exposure in children. In this cross-sectionally designed study, we recruited 22 children exposed to electronic cigarette vapors and 26 non-exposed between the ages of 4-12 years. We compared metabolic features across three biomatrices, blood, saliva, and exhaled breath condensate. We noted moderate to strong pairwise, sample-specific, and feature-specific adjusted correlations. Annotated features associated with direct and secondhand electronic cigarette exposure were noted. These results demonstrate that less invasive biomatrices may be used to detect features associated with secondhand electronic cigarette vapor exposure in children.

Use of high-resolution metabolomics to assess the biological perturbations associated with maternal exposure to Bisphenol A and Bisphenol F among pregnant African American women.

BACKGROUND: Human and animal exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has been associated with adverse developmental and reproductive effects. The molecular mechanisms by which BPA exposure exerts its effects are not well-understood, even less known about its analogues bisphenol F (BPF). To address these knowledge gaps, we conducted an untargeted metabolome-wide association study (MWAS) to identify metabolic perturbations associated with BPA/BPF exposures in a pregnant African American cohort. METHODS: From a subset of study participants enrolled in the Atlanta African American Maternal-Child cohort, we collected both urine samples, for targeted exposure assessment of BPA (N = 230) and BPF (N = 48), and serum samples, for high-resolution metabolomics (HRM) profiling (N = 230), during early pregnancy (8-14 weeks' gestation). Using an established untargeted HRM workflow consisting of MWAS modeling, pathway enrichment analysis, and chemical annotation and confirmation, we investigated the potential metabolic pathways and features associated with BPA/BPF exposures. RESULTS: The geometric mean creatinine-adjusted concentrations of urinary BPA and BPF were 0.85 ± 2.58 and 0.70 ± 4.71 µg/g creatinine, respectively. After false positive discovery rate correction at 20 % level, 264 and 733 unique metabolic features were significantly associated with urinary BPA and BPF concentrations, representing 10 and 12 metabolic pathways, respectively. Three metabolic pathways, including steroid hormones biosynthesis, lysine and lipoate metabolism, were significantly associated with both BPA and BPF exposure. Using chemical standards, we have confirmed the chemical identity of 16 metabolites significantly associated with BPA or BPF exposure. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings support that exposure to BPA and BPF in pregnant women is associated with the perturbation of aromatic amino acid metabolism, xenobiotics metabolism, steroid biosynthesis, and other amino acid metabolism closely linked to stress responses, inflammation, neural development, reproduction, and weight regulation.

Collagen Based Multicomponent Interpenetrating Networks as Promising Scaffolds for 3D Culture of Human Neural Stem Cells, Human Astrocytes, and Human Microglia.

This work describes for the first time the fabrication and characterization of multicomponent interpenetrating networks composed of collagen I, hyaluronic acid, and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate for the 3D culture of human neural stem cells, astrocytes, and microglia. The chemical composition of the scaffolds can be modulated while maintaining values of complex moduli within the range of the mechanical performance of brain tissue (∼6.9 kPa) and having cell viability exceeding 84%. The developed scaffolds are a promising new family of biomaterials that can potentially serve as 3D in vitro models for studying the physiology and physiopathology of the central nervous system.