Multi-omics signatures of the human early life exposome

Abstract

Environmental exposures during early life play a critical role in life-course health, yet the molecular phenotypes underlying environmental effects on health are poorly understood. In the Human Early Life Exposome (HELIX) project, a multi-centre cohort of 1,301 mother-child pairs, we associated individual exposomes consisting of >100 chemical, physical and lifestyle exposures assessed in pregnancy and childhood, with multi-omics profiles (methylome, transcriptome, metabolome and proteins) in childhood. We identified 1,170 associations, 249 in pregnancy and 921 in childhood, which revealed potential biological responses and sources of exposure. The methylome best captures the persistent influence of pregnancy exposures, including maternal smoking; while childhood exposures were associated with features from all omics layers, revealing novel signatures for indoor air quality, essential trace elements, endocrine disruptors and weather conditions. This study provides a unique resource (https://helixomics.isglobal.org/) to guide future investigation on the biological effects of the early life exposome.

Exposome-wide Association Study for Metabolic Syndrome

“…Nevertheless, the technical barriers in multi-omics and exposomics research do exist, such as the technological challenges on chemical and biological agents identifications ( David et al, 2021 ), the bioinformatics challenges related to the computational throughput and workflows, and the high financial costs of such exposomics cohort study. Fortunately, the results from current large environmental health studies and exposomics related international consortiums including the Global Exposome Harmonization project and others such as the HELIX project provided some insights for future research ( Stratakis et al, 2020 ; Maitre et al, 2021 ).…”

Multi-Omics Profiling for Health

“…They identified 1170 associations, 249 in pregnancy and 921 in childhood, which revealed potential biological responses and sources of exposure. The methylome best captured the persistent influence of pregnancy exposures, including maternal smoking, while childhood exposures were associated with features from all omics layers, revealing novel signatures for indoor air quality, essential trace elements, endocrine disruptors, and weather conditions ( 131 ). To better understand how the exposome shapes an individual’s phenotype, a recent study used deep longitudinal personal exposome and internal multi-omics profiling and annotated thousands of chemical and biological components in the personal exposome cloud, finding a significant correlation with thousands of internal biomolecules which were cross-validated using corresponding clinical data.…”

IDSL.GOA: Gene Ontology Analysis for Interpreting Metabolomic datasets

“…This integration has not been achieved before IDSL.GOA since there was not a single knowledgebase developed that have created the GO-term specific focused reaction networks. IDSL.GOA can also support the statistical multi-omics analysis to extract meaningful biological information from correlated features across multiple omics datasets 31 . By integrating the results of IDSL.GOA with the results of statistical multi-omics analysis, researchers can obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms that are involved in the disease or condition of interest.…”