Constructing HairDB to facilitate exposome research using human hair

Ying Chen; Yukai Wang; David Hidalgo Delgado; Huaxu Yu; Tingting Zhao; Mingliang Fang; Tao Huan

doi:10.1016/j.envint.2024.109077

Constructing HairDB to facilitate exposome research using human hair

Environ Int. 2024 Oct 16:193:109077. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2024.109077. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Ying Chen¹, Yukai Wang¹, David Hidalgo Delgado¹, Huaxu Yu¹, Tingting Zhao¹, Mingliang Fang², Tao Huan³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Campus, 2036 Main Mall, Vancouver V6T 1Z1, BC, Canada.
² Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, 2005 Songhu Road, Shanghai 200433, China.
³ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Campus, 2036 Main Mall, Vancouver V6T 1Z1, BC, Canada. Electronic address: thuan@chem.ubc.ca.

PMID: 39427574
DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2024.109077

Abstract

This study introduces HairDB, an online database serving as a comprehensive repository of hair-related chemicals for exposome research. HairDB was created via an integrative approach. It first extracted 4,184 unique hair-related chemicals through text mining of over 34 million PubMed abstracts and 5.2 million PubMed Central articles, followed by manual data checking. HairDB also applied an artificial intelligence-enabled search to discover organic aerosol biomarkers in literature. A set of 768 chemicals used in hair-related products was then curated through a combination of manual searches and data extraction from the Cosmetic Ingredient Database (CosIng) of the European Union. From manually reading review papers, 29 organic aerosol biomarkers were extracted. Furthermore, 3,679 known exposure chemicals extracted from the Toxin and Toxin Target Database (T3DB) were incorporated in HairDB to represent the possible environmental exposures detected on hair surfaces. The comprehensive set of chemicals captured in HairDB represents the current knowledge of what can be found in and on hair. HairDB was constructed as a user-friendly web interface, allowing easy exploration of hair-related chemicals and tailored for annotating mass spectrometry-based hair exposomics data. The development of HairDB marks an important step forward in using hair as a biological matrix for chemical exposure measurement, facilitating the adoption of hair for exposome research. HairDB is publicly available at https://www.hairdb.ca/.