In Western Europe, river water quality can be assessed using sentinel species such as the amphipod Gammarus fossarum. In this work of environmental metabolomics, the objective was to develop suitable chemometrics methods, using a limited number of individuals, to assess the modification of the metabolism of G. fossarum exposed to two human pharmaceuticals. Males and females gammarids were exposed to a mixture of the anxiolytic oxazepam and the antiepileptic carbamazepine (1000 ng L-1) for 14 days under laboratory conditions according to a full factorial design 2² (repeated 5 times). They were analyzed at the single individual scale using a method including a μQuEChERS type extraction followed by a nanoliquid chromatography analysis coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry. The molecular fingerprints obtained were investigated using XCMS. Several corrections of experimental drifts (by using lock mass and Quality Control samples) were tested prior to using APCA + method for the exploitation of the unbalanced designed data. Signal reproducibility was greatly improved by the lock mass normalisation. From the experimental design, a significant effect of both experimental factors "exposure to the mixture" and "gammarid gender" on the signals measured were highlighted by APCA+. Finally, the results obtained made it possible to identify variables responsible for each of the factor effects.
Keywords: APCA; Designed experiments data; Environmental untargeted metabolomics; Invertebrates; Lock mass normalisation; NanoLC-HRMS.
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