Abstract

Screening of pesticide metabolites in human in a large scale lab

Author(s): Eunyoung Lee

A research was carried out as part of the Human Biomonitoring for Europe effort to identify novel biomarkers of pesticide exposure and to evaluate exposure patterns [1]. Five locations of Europe were sampled for human urine over the course of two seasons [2]. With the use of a standardised suspect screening technique based on liquid chromatography combined with high resolution mass spectrometry implemented in five laboratories, the study's goal was to identify pesticides and their metabolites in urine samples that had been collected [3]. Comprehensive data reduction, correction of mass error and retention time drifts, isotopic pattern analysis, adduct and elemental composition annotation and elemental composition mining for potential pesticide metabolite annotations were all included in an integrated data processing workflow [4]. To produce representative data-dependent tandem mass spectra, the acquired tentative annotations were used [5]. And confirmed by spectral comparison to reference spectra acquired by human liver S9 in vitro incubation studies or produced from commercially available reference standards [6]. Pesticides used as parents and their metabolites (sulphate conjugates) were found [7]. These together linked to 46 different insecticides. There is a chance that more pesticides and/or their metabolites will be verified in future research for the remaining tentative annotations since either RTs suggested a mistaken annotation [8]. Thus, only a portion of the potential pesticide exposure is represented by the reported results. Human biomonitoring (HBM) enables the evaluation of population exposure to a variety of chemicals, including those that are known to cause or suspected to induce negative health consequences. Current pesticides, many of which are extensively metabolised in the body, are among the substances of rising concern [9].