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Dryad

Data for: The salivary metabolome of children and parental caregivers in a large-scale family environment study

Data files

Apr 19, 2024 version files 62.42 MB

Abstract

Human metabolism is complex and dynamic and is impacted by genetics, diet, health, and countless inputs from the environment. Beyond the genetics shared by family members, cohabitation leads to shared microbial and environmental exposures. Furthermore, metabolism is affected by factors such as inflammation, antibiotic potential, environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure, metabolic regulation, and environmental exposure to heavy metals within the home. Metabolomics represents a useful analytical method to assay the metabolism of individuals to find potential biomarkers for metabolic conditions that may not be phenotypically obvious or represent unknown physiological processes. As such, we applied untargeted LC-MS metabolomics to archived saliva samples from a racially diverse group of elementary school-aged children and their caregivers collected during the “90-month” assessment of the Family Life Project. We assayed a total of 1,425 saliva samples of which 1,344 were paired into 672 caregiver/child dyads. We compared the metabolomes of children (N = 719) and caregivers (N = 706) within and between homes, performed population-wide “metabotype” analyses, and measured associations between metabolites and salivary biomeasures of inflammation, antioxidant potential, ETS exposure, metabolic regulation, and heavy metals. Dyadic analyses revealed that children and their caregivers have largely similar salivary metabolomes. Although there were differences between the dyads at the individual levels of analysis, dyads explained most (62%) of the metabolome variation. At a population level of analysis, our data clustered into two large groups, indicating that people likely share most of their metabolomes, but that there are distinct “metabotypes” across large sample sets. Lastly, individual differences in several metabolites – which were putative oxidative damage-associated or pathological markers – were significantly correlated with salivary measures indexing inflammation, antioxidant potential, ETS exposure, metabolic regulation, and heavy metals. Implications of the effects of family environment on metabolomic variation at the population, dyadic, and individual levels of analyses for health and human development are discussed.