Multi-omics of coal miner's exposed to 10+ years of coal dust....

 

I was really torn on using the above .gif because I come from a long line of people who have died either in coal mines or thanks to what they inhaled down there. Unfortunately, all of my cousins that are under the ground somewhere in WV bathe in the political disinformation kool-aid to the point that I can't even talk to them, so we're going to have some fun with this important new study! 

If you think being a coal miner in West Virginia is dangerous just because the governor of the state made his billions of dollars running the least safe mines in the USA and never paying his legal fees - you'd be right. But it's a super dangerous thing to do anywhere in the world and there is always some piece of dog shit who is willing to save $1 by making it a little less safe for you. 

This study found a cohort with the following requirements - you had to be over 40 and you had to have spent more than 10 years breathing coal dust. How'd they know they weren't lying about being down there 10 years? Well...most of them had easily diagnose-able pneumoconiosis. Which, yes, I had to copy and paste. They did have to exclude people who had lung cancer... ugh...so if you know Zoolander, maybe the funniest movie that ever happened that doesn't have Will Ferrell as the lead, you know what .gif I should use next and I probably shouldn't.

They didn't go after plasma - they went after BALF (no, I can't spell it) which is a fluid in the lung that is not fun to get from people. I hope they compensated these volunteers very very well. 

They FASP'ed the BALF (man, if you are thinking of FASP'ing human samples, I'll legit send you S-traps they're like $5 a sample, particularly if you cut someone's lung while they were under anaesthesia) for proteomics using a TIMSTOF Pro and they did the metabolomics on an Exploris 120. Everything looks pretty standard. MaxQuant for the proteomics data and MetaboAnalyst for metabolomics. 

I can't exactly follow where the ELISA came in here in the study - like what materials and why when they had proteomics on the BALF. I figured we'd be doing ELISA on cool blood targets, and maybe that is what they did? Oh - they did ELISA on some BALFs from these patients and an unanalyzed (by LCMS cohort). I think.

Hey - I wonder if the proteomic or metabolomic alterations of breathing coal dust for 10 years is obvious? Oh.

Yeah....it might be obvious.....

I'm not sure what the authors are planning to do with these data. I mean, you could probably put together a powerpoint presentation on - inhaling coal dust for 10 years alters your lungs on a basic molecular level? 

Completely unrelated -