Non-Targeted Analysis for Environmental and Human Exposure Monitoring and Human Health Study

Targeted contaminant monitoring methods provide highly sensitive and quantitative tools for assessing well-characterized chemical hazards in exposure monitoring and risk assessment. However, only a small fraction of the thousands of chemicals currently in commerce has ever been routinely monitored. Growing concern over diseases associated with human exposure to environmental contaminants and their transformation products, together with the increasing demand from regulatory agencies to evaluate the risks of existing, emerging, and unknown chemicals, has accelerated the development of non-targeted analysis (NTA) approaches using high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS). These approaches are emerging as powerful and unbiased tools for comprehensive monitoring of environmental and human chemical exposure.HRMS-based NTA has demonstrated remarkable potential for profiling the chemical space of environmental, food, and biological samples by enabling the detection and tentative identification of a wide range of compounds. Nevertheless, comprehensive identification of all chemicals present in complex matrices remains a major scientific challenge. Recent advances in NTA have been driven by increasingly sophisticated and accessible HRMS instrumentation, along with powerful data-processing platforms, cheminformatics tools, and computational workflows for data interpretation. Together, these developments are greatly expanding the ability to discover and characterize previously unknown compounds.Despite these advances, significant barriers remain in translating NTA workflows and results into routine exposure assessment and regulatory decision-making. As a result, there is a growing need to standardize and harmonize NTA workflows, from sample collection and preparation to data acquisition, processing, and interpretation, in order to improve the reliability, reproducibility, and comparability of NTA studies. In parallel, predictive models for retention time and fragmentation are urgently needed to strengthen confidence in chemical identification, while quantitative NTA is rapidly emerging as a critical frontier for estimating chemical concentrations in complex samples.This Research Topic welcomes submissions that advance the science and application of NTA in human and environmental exposure assessment. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:• Identification and characterization of novel chemicals, metabolites, and transformation products in human biological samples for exposure assessment.• Applications of NTA in environmental contamination monitoring and assessment.• Advances in the standardization and harmonization of NTA workflows.• Development and application of quantitative NTA approaches for estimating chemical concentrations without reference standards.• NTA studies focused on emerging contaminants of concern.• Predictive models and computational tools that improve chemical identification and annotation.• NTA workflows designed to enhance the reliability, reproducibility, transparency, and regulatory relevance of analytical results.• Innovations in HRMS instrumentation, data processing, cheminformatics, machine learning, and data analysis methodologies. Topic editors: Yong-Lai Feng, Natalia Soares Quinete, Maria Margalef Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82896/non-targeted-analysis-for-environmental-and-human-exposure-monitoring-and-human-health-study