A doctoral student and a lecturer in the University Of Illinois School Of Information Sciences are utilizing an informatics method to help prioritize chemical linkages for further testing by analysing the prevalence of individual components and their most probable combinations in consumer products.
Professor Catherine Blake and doctoral student Henry Gabb are head authors of the study. People are exposed to significantly bigger levels of chemicals now than in the previous from multiple sources, comprising consumer products. “We are in the effect in an unregulated biochemistry study. It has become an accepted or perhaps ignored the trade – off of life in modern society,” says Gabb.
For verifying the chemicals present in consumer products, Gabb utilized a web – scraping program to collect product names, ingredients and categories lists from online retail sites. The database he created comprises closely 39,000 products and more than 32,000 ingredients. Once the team had such information on various ingredients in consumer products, he had to rectify the issue of chemical synonym, the use of distinct names for the similar substance.
“The same chemical can disclose on multiple product labels under numerous distinct names. Unless you can rectify them to a unique chemical you do not really know what you are estimating,” says Gabb. For instance, according to the PubChem Compound information from the National Library of Medicine, wintergreen oil is another substitute for methyl salicylate, a suspected endocrine disruptor.
Blake and Gabb targeted 55 potential endocrine – disrupting and asthma linked chemicals from a primary study that utilized gas chromatography mass spectrometry analysis to estimate the levels of such chemicals in consumer products. They identified 30% of the products in their information comprised at least one of the 55% target chemicals, and 13% contained more than one.
The informatics method enables the scientists to look at numerous products and identify more chemicals than the gas chromatography – mass spectrometry method, which is constrained to what is mainly listed on product labels that are not always complete. Gas chromatography linked with mass spectrometry can detect chemicals that are not listed on the label of product or are even the component of product formulation, like chemicals that leach from the packaging of product, degradation of products or other impurities,” says Gabb.
Filed Under: News
Questions related to this article?
👉Ask and discuss on Electro-Tech-Online.com and EDAboard.com forums.
Tell Us What You Think!!
You must be logged in to post a comment.