Use of liver volatile compounds as markers of animal exposure to toxic contaminants

Nowadays, the control of the contamination of the food chain by toxic xenobiotics became a major safety issue given the strong relationships pointed out between chronic exposure to contaminants and pathologies such as cancers. This issue is particularly critical for animal-derived food products. The current methods operated to ensure this control are expensive, difficult to set up and unsuitable with frequent, regular and large-scale controls required to guarantee effectively the chemical safety of food. A new approach to trace-back these toxic xenobiotics along the food chain may consist in measuring markers of animal exposure to contaminants through omics approach. Among the various classes of metabolism end-products, we focused on volatile compounds which were identified as promising biomarkers to detect pathologies [11] or exposure to contaminants [10]. The present study aims to set up a SPME-MS fingerprinting method to point out the relevance of volatile metabolites in hepatic tissues as markers of chicken exposure to three types of xenobiotics: (i) an organochlorinated insecticide _lindane (γ-HCH), (ii) an environmental micropollutants_a mix of polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs), and (iii) an antibiotic _ ampicillin (Ampisol)