Omics-Based Insights into Human Long-Term Exposure to Environmental Metals

Long-term environmental exposure to metals leads to epigenetic changes and may increase risks to human health. The human epidemiologic and the toxicologic animal model studies provide strong evidence of metal exposure related DNA methylation changes, and, consequently alterations in gene expression, in metabolic, genetic and signal transduction pathways and their functions. The current study is designed to investigate genome wide DNA methylation and transcriptomic changes induced by human chronic environmental exposure to metals. Further, the goal of this study is annotation of genomic variants by whole exome sequencing and their possible association with plasma levels of a range of chemical elements. This study investigates the interplay between CpG methylation, genomic variants and mRNA expression in the context of blood metallome. In total, 100 participants including 50 mining region residents (MRR) and 50 non-mining region residents (NMR) were included for currect study.