What do chemical pollutants do to our bodies? It’s a timely question considering that last week, people in Philadelphia cleaned their grocery shelves of bottled water after a toxic leak from a chemical plant spilled into a tributary of the Delaware River, a source of drinking water for 14 million people. And it was just last month that a train carrying a number of other hazardous materials derailed east of Palestine, Ohio, releasing an unknown amount of toxic chemicals.
There is no doubt that we are polluting the planet. To find out how these pollutants may be affecting our own bodies, we need to find out how we are exposed to them. What chemicals are we inhaling, eating and digesting? And how much? The field of exposomics, which aims to study our exposure to pollutants, among other factors, could help give us some much-needed answers. Read the whole story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This story is from The Checkup, Jessica’s weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
Read more:
+ The toxic chemicals around us. Meet Nicolette Bugher, a researcher working to expose the poisons lurking in our environment and discover what they mean to human health. Read the whole story.
+ Build a better chemical factory, with microbes. Professor Kristala Jones Prather is helping to turn microbes into efficient producers of desired chemicals. Read the whole story.
+ Microplastics are messing with seabird microbiomes. The next step is to find out what this might mean for your health and ours. Read the whole story.
