What is it about?
Thousands of chemicals exist in house dust but to date most studies have focused on a relatively small collection of chemicals. The present study uses an analytical technique called mass spectrometry to identify molecular structures of environmental health relevance. A modest number of compounds in this proof-of-concept study were ultimately confirmed to be present in dust, with nearly half not previously associated with dust in the published literature.
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Why is it important?
Considering the findings in this proof of concept study it is likely that scaled-up efforts, involving a more inclusive reference database, a larger number of standards, and optimized analytical methods would aid in identifying (and potentially quantifying) hundreds of previously unstudied chemicals in dust and other media.
Perspectives
The experiences learned by using ChemSpider and our own EPA Comptox Chemistry Dashboard (https://comptox.epa.gov), as reported in this article, helped define new functionality we would need to add to support non-targeted analysis. it Specifically this work helped us understand better approaches to rank-ordering the hit list searches.
Dr Antony John Williams
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Linking high resolution mass spectrometry data with exposure and toxicity forecasts to advance high-throughput environmental monitoring, Environment International, March 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2015.12.008.
You can read the full text:
Resources
The EPA iCSS Chemistry Dashboard to Support Compound Identification Using High Resolution Mass Spectrometry Data
A Presentation Given at the ACS Fall Meeting, September 2016, regarding how to use the Chemistry Dashboard for rank-ordering formula and mass-based searches
Structure Identification Using High Resolution Mass Spectrometry Data and the EPA CompTox Dashboard
A Presentation Given at the SWEMSA meeting, in November 2016, regarding how to use the Chemistry Dashboard for rank-ordering formula and mass-based searches. This presentation specifically shows batch-based search and the utility of "MS-ready structures"
Contributors
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