The broad topic of biomarker research has an often-overlooked component: the documentation and interpretation of the surrounding chemical environment and other meta-data, especially from visualization, analytical and statistical perspectives. A second concern is how the environment interacts with human systems biology, what the variability is in "normal" subjects, and how such biological observations might be reconstructed to infer external stressors. In this article, we report on recent research presentations from a symposium at the 248th American Chemical Society meeting held in San Francisco, 10-14 August 2014, that focused on providing some insight into these important issues.
Keywords: Breath analysis; chemical carcinogenesis; environmental; heavy metal toxicity; pesticide exposure; pollution/ecotoxicology.