The newest most advanced way to study gene x environment interactions

Another part of the study though involves a group at Yale led by Mark Gerstein.

We'll probably find a few hundred things, maybe seventy, eighty, we don't know how many, that are having big effects that look maybe toxic.

We'll have studied forty of them as a start in these villages, and he can begin...

That laboratory can begin to look in large environmental exposure databases to ask, are people exposed, you know, to these things? Is there something there? Is there a there there, right? So we're connecting this kind of very rigorous, that's the key, bench experimentation that identifies compounds and chemicals and drugs, things that we're exposed to in life that could have an effect on development in, in living humans, but we're only showing it in, in a test tube, essentially.

And now we connect that to live data from living humans and see, is there something there? And this kind of combination massively increases our power again because we're not looking at the whole universe, we're looking at just, you know, a few dozen things.

And, and, and so we can ask about these.

One thing I should say about the EpiTox library that's really interesting is that, right, it includes drugs, it include, like...

You know, I think there are thirteen or fourteen hundred FDA-approved drugs-

Mm-hmm

... you know, something like that.

You know, so it includes most of those.

I mean, it's not gonna include a drug that just came out yesterday, but it includes, you know, over thirteen hundred drugs.

It includes water contaminants, soil contaminants, uh, plastics, industrial chemicals, things that are in the environment and that humans are exposed to at different levels in different places.