Evaluation of candidate biomarkers for the assessment of PCBs contamination

Description

Environmental pollutants exhibit a variety of adverse biological effects on human health. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) can modulate differentiation, metabolism and function of the white adipose tissue (WAT) in humans through a wide range of mechanisms able to exert their effects in the whole organism. Moreover, interactions among different classes of compounds, frequently with opposing effects, complicate hazard evaluation and risk assessment creating a biomarker overview not easily linkable to the single class of compounds. The 'omics' revolution has spurred a variety of investigative techniques in a host of model systems, and has contributed to a rapid increase in the amount of data concerning on transcripts, proteins, metabolites and other molecules present in target tissues. In this preliminary study we investigated biomarker signatures of exposure to PCBs on multipotent pre-adipocytes, by using a double bioinformatics/genomic approach. A pre-identification of the genomic signatures for both metabolic and pathological pathways targeted by PCBs was approached by using integrated text mining tools (see abstract P11). Thereafter, pre-adipocytes were isolated from human donor WAT and, on the base of the cell vitality screening results (time and dose), were exposed for 72 hours to two dilutions of a mussel extract and to PCB 153 (10ng/ml). Subsequently, mRNAs were extracted and analysed for gene expression profile evaluation with Genechip Affymetrix HG-133 Plus 2.0. Data were analysed and compared with bioinformatics results (P11)

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