Yale school of public health symposium on lifetime exposures and human health: the exposome; summary and future reflections
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The exposome is defined as "the totality of environmental exposures encountered from birth to death" and was developed to address the need for comprehensive environmental exposure assessment to better understand disease etiology. Due to the complexity of the exposome, significant efforts have been made to develop technologies for longitudinal, internal and external exposure monitoring, and bioinformatics to integrate and analyze datasets generated. Our objectives were to bring together leaders in the field of exposomics, at a recent Symposium on "Lifetime Exposures and Human Health: The Exposome," held at Yale School of Public Health. Our aim was to highlight the most recent technological advancements for measurement of the exposome, bioinformatics development, current limitations, and future needs in environmental health. In the discussions, an emphasis was placed on moving away from a one-chemical one-health outcome model toward a new paradigm of monitoring the totality of exposures that individuals may experience over their lifetime. This is critical to better understand the underlying biological impact on human health, particularly during windows of susceptibility. Recent advancements in metabolomics and bioinformatics are driving the field forward in biomonitoring and understanding the biological impact, and the technological and logistical challenges involved in the analyses were highlighted. In conclusion, further developments and support are needed for large-scale biomonitoring and management of big data, standardization for exposure and data analyses, bioinformatics tools for co-exposure or mixture analyses, and methods for data sharing.
Date Issued
2017-12-08
Date Acceptance
2017-12-01
Citation
Human Genomics, 2017, 11 (1)
ISSN
1479-7364
Publisher
BioMed Central
Journal / Book Title
Human Genomics
Volume
11
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s). 2017.
Open Access:
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Open Access:
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29221465
PII: 10.1186/s40246-017-0128-0
Subjects
Genetics & Heredity
Publication Status
Published online
Coverage Spatial
England
Article Number
32