Evaluating Chemical Exposures and Toxicity of Complex Mixtures and Multiple Stressors

Dear Colleagues, 

We are pleased to invite you to contribute an article to the Toxics Special Issue “Evaluating Chemical Exposures and Toxicity of Complex Mixtures and Multiple Stressors.” Humans are chronically exposed to complex mixtures of inorganic and organic contaminants and diverse external stressors (stress, sleep, diet, etc.). The composition of complex mixtures that are encountered in the environment often differ substantially from those that are released into the environment due to intricate fate and transport processes. Real-life exposures to complex mixtures of environmental chemicals occur both sequentially and concurrently, and through multiple pathways. After an initial exposure, these chemical mixtures can interact at biological sites and elicit effects through similar or dissimilar modes of action. These factors, along with inherent difficulties associated with comprehensive characterization of complex mixtures, make assessing cumulative risk exceptionally challenging. Yet, new and emerging methods are advancing our knowledge of the exposome and will underpin research-driven decision making on the management of chemical mixtures. Analytical approaches are allowing for a more complete understanding of the chemical milieu that exist in exposure settings and require further assessment through toxicological assays. Innovative toxicological approaches are facilitating more in-depth assessments of the interplay between environmental toxicants and various external factors that may mediate toxicant effects.

This Special Issue aims to bring together novel approaches and established experts in the areas of mixture toxicology and exposure science to foster a better understanding of potential adverse health effects from exposure to complex contaminant mixtures and/or multiple stressors. We believe that this is accomplished through contributions from environmental chemists characterizing realistic environmental mixtures of all types, toxicologists conducting controlled experiments in vitro and/or in vivo to understand health outcomes and/or underlying mechanistic effects from exposure to mixtures and/or multiple stressors, and public health researchers performing mixture analyses to define the associations between complex contaminant mixture exposures and human health outcomes at varying stages of development. Our hope is that through bringing together these contributions we will foster a better understanding of the complexity of mixtures analyses and more clearly outline a path forward for this field of research.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but not limited to) the following: new methods for assessing cumulative risk, compositional characterization of chemical mixtures, toxicological evaluation of environmental mixtures using modelling approaches, in vitro models, and in vivo model organisms, computational approaches to defining mixtures exposure and hazard, and epidemiological assessments of joint effects of mixtures on human health outcomes.

Dr. Christopher Kassotis
Dr. Allison Phillips
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Toxics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.