what you're looking at our tiny spores
of Aspergillus a type of fungus that can
find its way into your lungs through air
conditioning units and this year is a
rotifer a microscopic animal that loves
aquatic environments these nearly
invisible bits can hitch a ride on your
clothes find their way into your body
and could have an impact on your overall
health they're part of your expose oh
and everyone has one
your expulsion is all the things you're
exposed comprised of biologicals so
things like pollen and microbes but also
when you're expose them is the chemical
exposure so that would be carcinogens
toxins that might be in the environment
some of them are natural you can
actually smell when it's gonna rain
because the air pressure drops and
there's a compound called Jim Aslam that
actually comes out of the ground dr.
Michael Schneider is a pioneering
geneticist who's investigating the
expose ohm and he doesn't mind making
this research personal I make billions
of measurements on me all the time I use
about eight of these devices I have
three smartwatches on me right now so
these three here this ring is not really
a ringing attention sensor it measures
heart rate and sleep and things like
that
according to dr. Schneider our health is
the combination of genetics and
environment and right now we know a lot
about the genetics side it really first
started in 1985 when people launched the
human genome project in the future
doctors will likely be able to give each
of us a genetic report card we are here
to celebrate the completion of the first
survey of the entire human genome
without a doubt this is the most
important most wondrous map ever
produced by humankind your genome is
really your blueprint for life they're
arranged in a very specific fashion and
what's Incredibles our six billion of
these letters in each person and that's
what dictates you going from a single
egg that gets fertilized turning into
this walking talking speaking human
being we're now about ten million times
cheaper than sequencing DNA then we were
back in 1985 but it really is just a
piece of the whole equation people
always studied environmental exposures a
kind of a city level we kind of know
what the exposure looks like in New York
City versus San Francisco versus Atlanta
they would study something called PM 2.5
it's a particulate matter that's 2.5
microns or less and that's what gets
into your lungs and that's what's an air
pollution that people are concerned
about
and so far as personalised efforts go
you see me taking surveys like you have
a survey of 100 questions whether you
have been smoking whether you have
drinking whether you suspect somebody
was coughing next to you
it was never imagined or directly you
could be sitting right now in a vast c10
the cones that you're breathing right
this moment and you would have no way of
knowing that the one hole that we always
saw was in fact you're exposed to fill
the gap dr. Schneider launched a project
to catalogue personal expose ohms on a
deeper level they redesigned an air
monitoring device and gave it to 15
volunteers to wear in and around the San
Francisco Bay Area for varying time
intervals the expose ometer basica has a
pump that sucks up air roughly about 115
what you would normally breathe and it
pulls the air and captures all the
particulates the monitor contains a
biological compatible theatre that
collects viruses fungi bacteria
underneath this builder we have a
specialized compartment and it's like
sup all kinds of volatile chemicals then
we're using a approach to extract things
off the future and then they become DNA
and RNA at that point we process them
into the next generation sequencing
library using another bunch of molecular
techniques and there's something to them
- the sequencing machine though
Schneider only tested 15 participants he
had over 70 billion readouts meeting
participants were bombarded with diverse
fungi protozoa and
allergens that we couldn't see in detail
before the chemicals went through a
separate process we put that in a
specialized equipment called a mass
spectrometer we can see thousands of
chemicals these are all the things that
you're presumably breathing and getting
exposed to on your skin and everywhere
else the results are these exposing
clouds it's your personal air bubble
mapped in detail some of our biggest
findings are that they expose them is
huge we discovered 2,500 species in the
mass spec analysis added roughly 3,000
chemical signatures to the mix we
discovered the expose them is vast we
discovered its dynamic we can classify
these expose
is bacterial dominant fungal dominant
plant dominant or mixed and what we've
discovered is that they'll vary from
location to location receive plastics in
every single sample we looked at we see
this compound deep which is the thing
you put in off to keep insects off of
you so there must be a lot of it
floating around in the air there's
certain organisms you'll see in the san
francisco sample particularly bacteria
found them sludge that we didn't see in
other samples now this is just with 15
people
so snyder wants to launch a 1,000 person
study next to tackle even bigger
questions what have we done that's
really affected people's health it's a
little early for that we mostly just
been cataloguing what is in the exposure
in terms of bacteria in chemicals that
really is the next step we want to learn
exactly what exposures are doing to
individual people's health people
different allergies they have different
asthma conditions some people would be
more sensitive to certain chemicals than
others we don't really understand how
this whole thing works
there's so much we don't know and this
is why we went after this by mapping the
microbial soup that surrounds us snyder
hopes that it could transform the way we
manage our health on a daily basis
i'd like to really switch us from what I
call hunch based medicine to data-driven
medicine a physician only has 15 minutes
text you to figure you out
I didn't the time you visit so I think
really in the future no one's gonna
figure out you better than you can
figure out you I think this is where a
data-driven medicine can be extremely
impactful curious about what you're
exposing looks like let us know in the
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