CLOSE MENU
As part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results Program (STAR), Associate Professor Brian Pavilonis, Professor Suzanne McDermott and colleagues were awarded $746,154 to quantify intrauterine exposure to metal mixtures and its impact on gene activity in newborns.
The research aims to identify changes in DNA methylation associated with exposures to metal mixtures, which could enhance the mechanistic understanding of how chemical mixtures result in human harm.
The team will develop a standardized method to quantify metals in meconium, the first stool that newborns pass, and implement this approach to measure metal concentrations from newborns delivered in New York City. They will also collect buccal cells from mothers and infants and identify methylated genes for the adverse birth outcomes. They will then investigate the relationship between the metal mixtures and DNA methylation.
The results of this project may lead to public health actions to identify at-risk infants and develop remediation strategies.
“Our research adds to the literature a cheap, easy, and effective way to measure metal concentrations in newborns, and to identify early exposures that can allow you to do an intervention,” Pavilonis says. “Right now, we do not know what constitutes ‘elevated’ levels of metals in meconium, and that is one of the goals of the project: to determine average concentrations of metals in NYC so in the future we can detect outliers.”
