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Medical and health sciences
- Biomarker discovery and evaluation
- Drug discovery and development
- Medicinal products
- Pharmaceutics
- Pharmacognosy and phytochemistry
- Pharmacology
- Pharmacotherapy
- Toxicology and toxinology
- Other pharmaceutical sciences
Microsampling -the acquisition of minute amounts of biological material- via dried blood spots (DBS) is increasingly receiving attention because of the many associated advantages. Applications include e.g. newborn screening, therapeutic drug monitoring and toxicology. Another booming research area is the study of the exposome - the overall result of someone's day-to-day exposure. One of the means to investigate this is via studying the adductome. More specifically, this study aims at studying protein adducts. It wishes to provide the fundaments for the intersection between the rapidly growing fields of microsampling and adductomics and, by doing so, wants to establish DBSbased adductomics as a new research area. Hereto, novel, optimized and fully validated procedures will be set up that will allow to determine three different sets of model adducts. These include an albumin adduct formed with a reactive metabolite of the analgesic paracetamol and with a reactive metabolite of the mycotoxin aflatoxin B1, and a hemoglobin adduct that is formed following exposure to acrylonitrile. This diverse set of adducts, representing exposure to a pharmaceutical, a food toxin and a environmental/industrial chemical, will serve as a basis for the development of procedures that can be broadly applied to study the adductome (also other adducts) in epidemiological and other studies. The possibility to conduct such studies on a large scale may allow to gain new insights in molecular toxicology.