Fall/Winter 2022 Alumni Magazine

Settling in and Setting up for the Future

By Erin Baker

The Baker Group is extremely excited to be a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill Chemistry Department and continue their research evaluating how the environment affects human health. Humans are exposed daily to a broad range of anthropogenic molecules through drinking water, eating food, and interacting with everyday consumer products such as plastic bottles, food containers, toys, and cosmetics. While many of the xenobiotic chemicals from these sources may not cause any harm when ingested, some disrupt normal bodily processes and change how our hormones, organs, and immune system function. The Baker Group is therefore devoted to understanding how current and emerging xenobiotics such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pesticides, and organophosphate flame retardants affect human health and alter our endogenous lipids, metabolites, and proteins. The required environmental and clinical measurements are however extremely complex as thousands of xenobiotics exist and can transform in the environment and body. Thus, novel developments in both analytical techniques and computational methods are necessary to analyze and quantify the xenobiotics and endogenous molecules in highly complex sample types such as blood and urine.

Currently, the Baker Group is working on new methods to increase sample throughput and provide sensitive and confident molecular analyses using automated solid phase extractions, liquid chromatography, supercritical fluid chromatography, ion mobility spectrometry and mass spectrometry measurements. By combining these different analytical techniques, they have created ways to quickly analyze thousands of samples and probe both xenobiotic and endogenous perturbations. For example, to evaluate exposure the Baker Group will commonly assess xenobiotics present in water, food, and air and then probe the xenobiotics, metabolites, lipids, and proteins in clinical samples such as human biofluids and tissues to understand the molecular effects.

These perturbations can also be evaluated in disease cohorts to probe exposure and disease linkages, and the Baker Group is currently studying various cancer types and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease to explore their associations. The thousands of analytical measurements performed by the Baker Group for the exposure studies also demand advanced computational approaches. The Baker Group is therefore creating new computational software programs and machine learning approaches using R, Python, and Java for the evaluation and visualization of their molecular detections and samples analyzed. The Baker Group is also working closely with bioinformatics and software development groups to add new capabilities to currently available software. Furthermore, it is extremely important to the group to release all datasets and software tools as open source so researchers worldwide can have access to the data and modify their tools if desired.

Due to the complex problems and disparate analyses the Baker Group is working on, they have recruited graduate students from a variety of different departments including Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Toxicology, and Engineering. They feel that combining these diverse perspectives and skills is fundamental to tackling the current and future challenges of the 21st century. Moreover, the Baker Group is extremely passionate about promoting their research and translating their results to the general public through community engagement and outreach. The Baker Group members are often seen presenting at various local, national, and international conferences and are excited to get back into K-12 classrooms to inspire our next generation of scientists.