Guy Brock, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics and Savitri Appana, MS, Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics collaborated on the published article, "Polychlorinated biphenyls, lead, and mercury are associated with liver disease in American adults: NHANES 2003-2004" in the Dec. 2010 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives. This study evaluated the potential role of low-level environmental pollution on liver disease in the general population and found dose-dependent associations between elevated levels of heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) with elevation in serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) activity, a marker for liver disease. This work was conducted as part of the Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, and Computational Biology core of the university’s Center for Environmental Genomics and Integrated Biology.