a type of fungus that can find its way into your lungs through air conditioning units.

And this here is a rotifer, a microscopic animal that loves aquatic environments.

These nearly invisible bits can hitch a ride on your clothes, find their way into your body,

and could have an impact on your overall health.

They're part of your exposome—and everyone has one.

Your exposome is all the things you're exposed to, comprised of biologicals—

so, things like pollen and microbes—

but also in your exposome is the chemical exposure.

So, that would be carcinogens, toxins that might be in the environment.

Some of them are natural.

You can actually smell when it's going to rain, because the air pressure drops, and

there's a compound called geosmin that actually comes out of the ground.

Dr. Michael Snyder is a pioneering geneticist who's investigating the exposome,

and he doesn't mind making this research personal.

I make billions of measurements on me all the time.

I use about eight of these devices.

I have three smart watches on me right now.

So, these three here.

This ring is not really a ring, it's actually a sensor.

It measures heart rate, and sleep and things like that.

According to Dr. Snyder, our health is a combination of genetics and environment.

And right now, we know a lot about the genetics side.

It really first started in 1985, when people launched the Human Genome Project.

“In the future, doctors will likely be able to give each of us a genetic report card."

“We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome.

Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.”

Your genome is really your blueprint for life.

They're arranged in a very specific fashion, and what's incredible is there are 6 billion

of these letters in each person.

And that's what dictates you going from a single egg that gets fertilized, turning into

this walking, talking, speaking, human being.

We're now about 10 million times cheaper in sequencing DNA than we were back in 1985.

But it really is just a piece of the whole equation.

People always studied environmental exposures at kind of a city level.

We kind of know what the exposure looks like in New York City, versus San Francisco,

versus Atlanta.

They would study something called PM2.5.

It's particulate matter that's 2.5 microns or less.

And that's what gets into your lungs, and that's what's in the air pollution

that people are concerned about.

And so far as personalized efforts go: It's usually taking surveys.

Like, you have survey of 100 questions about whether you have been smoking, whether you

have drinking, whether you suspect somebody was coughing next to you.

It was never measured directly.

You could be sitting right now in a vast sea of chemicals that you're breathing right this

moment, and you would have no way of knowing that.

The one hole that we always saw was in fact your exposome.

To fill the gap, Dr. Snyder launched a project to catalog personal exposomes on a deeper level.

They re-designed an air-monitoring device, and gave it to 15 volunteers to wear

in and around the San Francisco Bay Area for varying time intervals.

The exposimeter, basically, has a pump that sucks up air roughly about 1/15th of what

you would normally breathe, and it pulls the air and captures all the particulates.

The monitor contains a biological compatible filter that collects virus, fungi, bacteria.

Underneath this filter we have a specialized compartment, and it sucks up

all kinds of volatile chemicals.

Then, we're using approach to extract things off the filter.

Then they became DNA and RNA at that point.

We process them into the next general sequencing library using another bunch of molecular techniques

and then submit them to the sequencing machine.

Though Snyder only tested 15 participants, he had over 70 billion readouts—

meaning participants were bombarded with diverse fungi, protozoa, and allergens

that we couldn't see in detail before.

The chemicals went through a separate process.

We put that in a specialized equipment called a mass spectrometer.

And we can see thousands of chemicals.

These are all the things that you're presumably breathing and getting exposed to in your skin,

and everywhere else.

The results are these exposome clouds.

It's your personal air bubble, mapped in detail.

Some of our biggest findings are that the exposome is huge.

We discovered 2,500 species.

And the mass spec analysis added roughly 3,000 chemical signatures to the mix.

We discovered the exposome is vast.

We discovered it's dynamic.

We can classify these exposures as bacterial dominant, fungal dominant,

plant dominant, or mixed.

And what we've discovered is that they'll vary from location to location.

We see plastics in every single sample we looked at.

We see this compound DEET, which

is the thing you put in "Off" to keep insects off of you.

So, there must be a lot of it floating around in the air.

There's certain organisms you'll see in the San Francisco sample, a particular bacteria

found in sludge, that we didn't see in other samples.

Now, this is just with 15 people, so Snyder wants to launch a 1,000 person study next

to tackle even bigger questions.

What have we done that's really affected people's health?

It's a little early for that.

We mostly have just been cataloging what is in the exposome in terms of bacteria and chemicals.

That really is the next step.

We want to learn exactly what exposures are doing to individual people's health.

People have different allergies, they have different asthma conditions, some people would

be more sensitive to certain chemicals than others.

We don't really understand how this whole thing works.

There's so much we don't know,

and this is why we went after this.

By mapping the microbial soup that surrounds us, Snyder hopes that it could transform the

way we manage our health on a daily basis.

I'd like to really switch us from what I call hunch-based medicine to data-driven medicine.

A physician only has 15 minutes to actually figure you out in the time you visit.

So, I think really in the future, no one's going to figure out you

better than you can figure out you.

I think this is where data driven medicine can be extremely impactful.

Curious about what your exposome looks like?

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