Scope

Our mission is to create a major open access resource for professionals from diverse disciplines interested in the development of the concept of exposome and in its applications to public health.

When introduced in 2005, the notion of exposome was intended to encompass all the environmental exposures that individuals and populations may experience. It was proposed to complement the strong development of our knowledge about the genome and balance the effort to comprehend the role of the genome in human disease. Since then, the concept of exposome has been refined and extended to cover the so-called general external environment (e.g. the broader socio-economic environment, the urban-rural environment, and climate), specific external factors (e.g. lifestyle, occupations and exposures to pollutants) and the internal environment that reflects both biological effects of the external environment and biological responses to it. 

Despite the increasing scientific production in the field of exposome and its growing applications to public health, major challenges remain to be overcome mainly linked to the large number of exposures, their time-varying nature, and the complexity of their effects on human health.

We encourage contributions from different disciplines that may contribute to: 

·                further elaborate the concept of exposome and propose innovative applications to epidemiology and public health;

·                evaluate the exposome at different periods of life and how the time-varying exposome contribute to modulate disease risk;

·                explore novel dimensions of the exposome (e.g. key aspects of the evolving urban and rural environments);

·                propose innovative tools to assess the exposome (e.g. through digital personal devices and the guided integration of multiple sources of environmental data through informatics tools);

·                study the interplay between the three dimensions of the exposome (general external, specific external and internal environments) and the genetic background and how such interplay may influence health and disease;

·                identify new biomarkers associated with the exposome (e.g. through the application of “omic” technologies) and evaluate whether such biomarkers are related to health events;

·                develop new study designs and methodologies, including novel statistical and computational methods, to tackle the complexity of the interaction between the exposome and the human phenome.

We wish to promote a diversity of views and contributions coming from a broad range of disciplines including but not limited to epidemiology, environmental sciences, biostatistics and bioinformatics, genomics, epigenomics and metabolomics. Relevant contributions from more theoretical disciplines or apparently more distant disciplines such as evolutionary medicine are encouraged as they may help to shed a light on the fundamental mechanisms explaining the effects of the evolving exposome on human health.

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