Complex mixture exposures,such as those associated with water sources,are an important issue in health risk assessment.This study assessed the cytotoxicity of chemical mixtures extracted from water sources in regions of the Huai River Basin with high cancer incidences and built statistical models of cytotoxicity based on pollution profiles that were measured with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS).Both surface and ground waters were collected from rural water sources of Shenqiu County,Henan Province of China from 2008 to 2011 and extracted with XAD-2 resigns.Cytotoxicity was evaluated with Chinese hamster ovary K1 (CHO-K1) cells and compared against the pollution profiles of the extracts.Icso of water samples ranged from 0.023 to 0.338 L-eq/mL. The pollutants in waters determined by GC-MS are complex and some of the compounds that contributed to cytotoxicity lack toxicity data.A partial least squares (PLS) regression model of cytotoxicity was built based on linear aggregation of predictor variables (i.e.,peaks for single compounds in the gas chromatograms).The PLS model contains 2 PLS factors extracted from 141 variables.The model was validated internally with training data permutation and externally with a test sample.The model explained 92% of the cytotoxicity in the training samples and 40% in the test sample.This approach provides a general,rapid method for relating water toxicity to GC-MS chromatograms and for predicting the compounds that contribute most to toxicity.