Multi-omics approaches for understanding environmental exposure and human health

Abstract

Exposure to toxic substances from different environmental sources has an enormous impact on the public health, and is considered to be an important social issue. Therefore, omics approaches are used to understand relationships between diseases and environmental factors, but single omics analysis may have limitations in comprehensively interpreting specific biological phenomena. Multi-omics approaches, on the other hand, combines various single omics analyses in order to understand holistic biological mechanisms, which is sequentially assessed starting at the DNA sequence level and proceeding through epigenetic regulation, gene expression, protein expression and metabolic effects. Integration of multiple omics data is invaluable for comprehensively understanding causal relationship between environmental exposure and environmental health. Furthermore, cohort based multi-omics studies are in activation worldwide and the approaches could strengthen comprehension on how environmental factors affects human health by alteration of molecular-level of biological mechanisms.