Human serum lipidomics analysis revealed glyphosate may lead to lipid metabolism disorders and health risks

Abstract

Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) are one of the most widely used pesticides worldwide. Industrial workers in glyphosate-based herbicides manufacture are the populations who experience long-term exposure to high glyphosate levels. The impacts of glyphosate on human health are the important public health problem of great concern. Up to date, the potential adverse effects of glyphosate on humans or other mammals have been reported in multiple studies. However, limited research is available on lipid alternations related to human exposure to glyphosate. In fact, the perturbations in some lipid metabolisms have been found in industrial workers in previous work. This study aims to explore the serum lipidomic characterization and to understand the underlying mechanisms of health risks associated with glyphosate exposure. A nontargeted lipidomics study was conducted to investigate the 391 serum samples from the general population and chemical factory workers. It was demonstrated that glyphosate caused significant perturbations of 115 differentially expressed lipids. The main manifestations were the elevation of circulating diacylglycerols (DG), cholesteryl esters (CE), ceramides (Cer), sphingomyelins (SM), lysophosphatidylethanolamines (LPE) and phosphatidylcholines (PC), and the decrease of ysophosphatidylcholines (LPC), triacylglycerols (TG), fatty acids (FA) and phosphatidylethanolamines (PE). A total of 88 lipids were further screened as potential lipid biomarkers associated closely with glyphosate using partial correlation analysis, and five of which (including PC 16:0/18:2; O, PC 18:0/18:2; O, PC 18:0/20:4; O, PC O-40:9 and CE 18:3) showed excellent superior performance (AUC = 1) to evaluate and monitor health risks due to glyphosate exposure. The present work discovered glyphosate-induced potential health risks, including chronic hepatic and renal dysfunction, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases from a lipidomic perspective, and could inform the identification of early indicators and interpretation of biological mechanisms to detect health risks of the glyphosate-exposed populations as early as possible.

Keywords: Biomarkers; Glyphosate-exposure; Health risks; Lipidomics; Workers.