Metabolomics in environmental toxicology: Applications and challenges

Metabolomics is a discipline aiming to characterize the presence of metabolites in biological matrices under specific conditions. In recent years, metabolomics has increasingly been used in environmental research to explore the metabolic changes in humans and organisms under diverse environmental exposures, mainly chemical pollutants. Hence, metabolomics has become a key tool in exposome studies, to explore the biological effects at molecular level exerted by xenobiotics. To understand the biological mechanisms triggered by specific chemical compounds, the combination of metabolomics with information about the presence of xenobiotics in the biological samples (xenometabolome), and other molecular information obtained from omics technologies (e.g. transcriptomics, proteomics) is crucial, both in exposome studies, and adverse outcome pathways (AOPs) development.