Page 48 - I. Chemical biology and drug discovery

[I. Chemical biology and drug discovery-27]

Identification of biomarkers against acute and chronic

exposure of Phenol for risk assessment

Soee Kim¹, Min Kim¹, Yunkyung Kim¹, Jung-Suk Sung¹˙*

¹Department of Life Science, Dongguk University-seoul, Goyang 10326, South Korea

Most deleterious chemicals absorbed in the body are rapidly metabolized to other intermediate metabolites, making
it difficult to evaluate the exposure level of chemicals. Biomarkers are used as indicators to detect physiological
changes to the exposure of certain chemical, especially genomic-based biomarkers as alternatives to metabolite-

based biomarkers. In this study, the effects of exposure of phenol that widely used as polymeric materials in factories

or laboratories were identified by analyzing phenol specific biomarkers. After the treatment of phenol to BEAS-2b
cells which is normal cell line, gene ontology analysis was performed. The result showed that the expression of
genes related to cell apoptosis and angiogenesis were mainly changed. We sorted out genes with those expression

changed more than four times when treated with phenol to BEAS-2b cells compared to the untreated control group.
The results from in vivo experiment revealed that the expression of these genes was significantly altered in lung

tissue of the rat exposed to phenol. EPHA2, PLAU, GTPBP2 and TP53INP2 expression levels were commonly changed
in 1, 7, 30 days after oral administration of phenol to rats. Our results suggest that those genes can be used as

biomarkers for risk assessment of phenol exposure.