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Medical and health sciences
- Endocrinology and metabolic diseases
- Endocrinology and metabolic diseases
- Endocrinology and metabolic diseases
The term biomarker refers to a characteristic that is objectively measured, and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses. Specific well-characterized biomarkers have shown to predict relevant clinical outcomes across a variety of treatments and populations. Recent developments in high-resolution mass spectrometry resulting in more accuracy and new post-acquisition techniques improved the quality of the metabolite identification process. Mycotoxins are toxic fungal secondary metabolites that contaminate food and feed. Mycotoxin intake exerts a wide range of toxic effects including teratogenicity, carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, immunotoxicity and death. Nonetheless, chronic or even acute exposure to mycotoxins remains a daily fact. Thus, it is of crucial importance that mycotoxins’ metabolism in humans is unraveled, so more understanding on mycotoxin (exposure) biomarkers is acquired. Understanding the metabolic pathways of mycotoxins will enable researchers and public health officials to gain insight on how to assess the associated risks of mycotoxin exposure. Although some mycotoxin metabolites have already been determined, there are still many undefined metabolites for certain mycotoxins. The aim of this project is to determine mycotoxin metabolites which could be used as human exposure biomarkers, and to assess possible associations of (multiple) mycotoxin exposure with human kidney and liver illnesses.