Research summary
There is a growing awareness that environmental factors like foods, drugs, pollutants and the microbiome interact with our genes to affect our well-being. As Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics and Big Data Analytics, Dr. Jianguo Xia is using systems biology and exposomics (the study of the exposome, or the totality of an individual’s lifetime exposures and how they relate to health) to try to understand how genes and the environment interact.
He and his research team are using a three-pronged approach to come up with answers. They are developing a high-resolution mass spectrometry-based platform to measure the exposome and metabolome (the set of metabolites, or small molecules, present in organisms, cells or tissues). They are also developing computational solutions to integrate different omics profiles and connect with environmental metadata, and leveraging new digital technologies to augment big data analytics. Together, their findings could lead to applications that improve public and environmental health.