Speaker: Robert Cole, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Topic: What’s on your albumin?
Date: Monday, March 20, 2023
Time: 6:15 pm Dinner, 7:15 pm Presentation
Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instrument, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions)
This will be an in-person meeting. Attendees are required to show a vaccine card (either at the door or in advance using the web form) . If you have submitted your vaccine card before, your status is already recorded.
Dinner: Please RSVP to Andy Qi (andy.yue.qi@gmail.com) by Friday, March 17 if you will be attending the dinner.
Abstract: Environmental exposures contribute to chronic disease risk substantially more than heritable genetic variants. Outdoor air pollution is a complex environmental
mixture which is responsible for over 4 million deaths each year, an impact that is projected to rise over the next several decades. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has declared outdoor air pollution to be Group 1 human carcinogen. Outdoor air is a complex mixture of volatile organic toxins and carcinogens (e.g., aldehydes and benzene), sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and particulate matter. Assessing personal exposure to environmental toxicants in complex mixtures, such as outdoor air pollution, is a critical challenge for predicting disease risk. Thus, developing and validating biomarkers which reveal exposure to these complex mixtures would advance individual risk analysis. Using human serum albumin (HSA)-based biomonitoring, we reported dosimetric relationships between adducts at HSA Cys34 and ambient air pollutant levels. However, modifications at other sites in HSA may reveal a great number of novel adducts and provide a panel of exposure biomarkers for disease risk. To bridge this gap, we developed a novel untargeted mass spectrometry-based method, termed Pan-Protein Adductomics (PPA),
to agnostically detect and quantify modifications at multiple residues in human serum albumin (HSA). Our PPA method combines nanoflow-liquid chromatography, gas-phase fractionation, overlapping-window data-independent acquisition, and high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry to assay modifications on HSA. Our initial application of PPA is to assess temporal changes in HSA modifications in non-smoking women exposed to high levels of outdoor air pollution. While we are currently focused on modifications in albumin, the PPA approach is applicable to any protein and may expand the knowledge base of protein modifications.
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