Science
‘A healthy urban living environment for all’
When it comes to health, we tend to focus on genetics. However, some 70 – 80 per cent of our health is actually determined by environmental factors. Professor Roel Vermeulen and his Utrecht colleagues, along with various Dutch and international research groups, are currently studying the aggregate of all these factors: the exposome. text Marta Jiménez Cantabrana and Martje Ebberink illustration Silvia Celiberti
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ermeulen and his colleagues agree that in order to understand how environmental factors affect our health, we need to examine the molecules around us and the fingerprints they leave in our bodies. The researchers have set themselves the
ambitious task of systematically charting the thousands of chemicals and countless other factors we are exposed to on a daily basis. An understanding of what makes us sick and of what does not do so will help them determine which environmental factors are harmful to us and to what extent. They especially aim to figure out which combinations of these environmental factors are harmful and whether we are especially vulnerable to them at certain stages of our lives.
So how do you measure the invisible? ‘It’s far harder to “measure” someone’s exposome than it would be to sequence their genome,’ Vermeulen explains. ‘We don’t have a universal method to measure every single factor like geneticists do. Unlike the genome, the
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Illuster — March 2021
