Los Alamos National Laboratory Researcher Reports Recent Findings in Toxicology (Feature-Agnostic Metabolomics for Determining Effective Sub-cytotoxic Doses of Common Pesticides in Human Cells).

A recent report from researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory discusses the limitations of traditional molecular biology assays in determining cellular metabolic response to chemical challenges. The researchers propose a new approach using LC-MS/MS-based untargeted metabolomics with a feature-agnostic view of the data, combined with statistical methods, to directly monitor cellular metabolomic response to pesticides. The study found separate sub-cytotoxic metabolomic responses in human cardiomyocytes and neurons at different doses of chlorpyrifos and carbaryl. This agnostic approach to untargeted metabolomics could provide a new tool for determining effective doses of pesticides in a direct measurement of metabolomic response that is not cell type-specific. [Extracted from the article]