Human exposure to environmental chemicals is a major contributor to the global disease burden. To characterize the external exposome it is important to assess its chemical components and to study their impact on human health. Biomonitoring studies measure the body burden of environmental chemicals detected in biospecimens from a wide range of the population. The detection of these chemicals in biospecimens (and, hence, human tissues) is considered an important biomarker of human exposure. However, there is no readily available resource that compiles such exposure data for human tissues from published literature, and no studies that explore the patterns in the associations between tissue-specific exposures and human diseases. We present Human Tissue-specific Exposome Atlas (TExAs), a compilation of 380 environmental chemicals detected across 27 human tissues. TExAs is accessible via a user friendly webserver: https://cb.imsc.res.in/texas. We compare the chemicals in TExAs with 55 global chemical regulations, guidelines, and inventories, which represent several categories of the external exposome of humans. Further to understand the potential implications on human health of chemicals detected across human tissues, we employ a network biology approach and explore possible chemical exposure-disease associations. Ensuing analyses reveal the possibilities of disease comorbidities and demonstrate the application of network biology in unraveling complex disease associations due to chemical exposure.
Keywords: Chemical-gene-disease associations; Disease comorbidities; Environmental chemicals; Network biology; Tissue-specific chemical exposome.
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