Current treatment assessments and water quality monitoring that rely only on measuring the reduction of target contaminant concentrations are insufficient because they do not consider the complex and broader risks that specific or mixtures of contaminants and their transformation products pose to the environment and human health. This poses a pressing need for a breakthrough in toxicity-assessment technology because the currently available methods are neither feasible nor sufficient to provide the timely information needed for regulatory decision-making and technology development to eliminate these threats.<br/>We have developed a novel, feasible and cost-effective quantitative toxicogenomics-based toxicity assessment platform for high-throughput and effective chemical hazardous identification and environmental toxicity monitoring. We systematically optimized the assay platform, evaluated its robustness and performance, validated the assay output and demonstrated its wide applications.  Compared with other “omics’ technologies, the proposed method greatly improves the feasibility and cost effectiveness as results of its simpler, faster, and more reliable assay procedures. Furthermore, it provides multi-dimensional transcriptional level effect information that can more accurately reflect the chemical-induced time-dependent cell responses with higher sensitivity and specificity. We demonstrated that information-rich toxicogenomic data are powerful for evaluating toxic effects, understanding toxicity mechanisms, and obtaining pollutant-specific molecular fingerprints for compound /sample classification and identification. One of the main challenges in applying toxicogenomics for environmental monitoring is the lack of a quantitative method to convert the toxicogenomic information into a usable and transferable format that can be incorporated into risk assessment and regulatory framework. We pioneered quantitative molecule toxicity modeling within the context of toxicogenomics and paved the road for further mixture toxicity identification and prediction. Finally, we presented a number of cases studies that demonstrated the successful applications of the novel assay for mechanistic CECs toxicity assessment, whole effluent toxicity monitoring and risk-based water treatment technologies efficacy evaluation. <br/>

Towards risk-based environmental monitoring and technology assessment via toxicogenomics technology and data science

254th National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.