title: Informatics and Data Analytics to Support Exposome-Based Discovery for Public Health.
abstract: The complexity of the human exposome-the totality of environmental exposures encountered from birth to death-motivates systematic, high-throughput approaches to discover new environmental determinants of disease. In this review, we describe the state of science in analyzing the human exposome and provide recommendations for the public health community to consider in dealing with analytic challenges of exposome-based biomedical research. We describe extant and novel analytic methods needed to associate the exposome with critical health outcomes and contextualize the data-centered challenges by drawing parallels to other research endeavors such as human genomics research. We discuss efforts for training scientists who can bridge public health, genomics, and biomedicine in informatics and statistics. If an exposome data ecosystem is brought to fruition, it will likely play a role as central as genomic science has had in molding the current and new generations of biomedical researchers, computational scientists, and public health research programs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115; email: chirag_patel@hms.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Arjun K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Manrai
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709; email: balshaw@niehs.nih.gov.
authors.forename: Yuxia
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709; email: balshaw@niehs.nih.gov.
authors.forename: Pierre R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Bushel
authors.affiliation: Center for Systems Genomics, The Pennsylvania State University, College Station, Pennsylvania 16802.
authors.forename: Molly
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.affiliation: Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54124, Greece.
authors.forename: Spyros
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Karakitsios
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695.
authors.forename: Carolyn J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Mattingly
authors.affiliation: Center for Systems Genomics, The Pennsylvania State University, College Station, Pennsylvania 16802.|Geisinger Health System, Danville, Pennsylvania 17821.
authors.forename: Marylyn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ritchie
authors.affiliation: Renaissance Computing Institute, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27517.
authors.forename: Charles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schmitt
authors.affiliation: Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54124, Greece.
authors.forename: Denis A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Sarigiannis
authors.affiliation: Division of Biostatistics, Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-9011.
authors.forename: Duncan C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.affiliation: Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E8, Canada.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wishart
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709; email: balshaw@niehs.nih.gov.
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Balshaw
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115; email: chirag_patel@hms.harvard.edu.|Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02114.
authors.forename: Chirag J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Patel
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D019295:Computational Biology; D017753:Ecosystem; D004781:Environmental Exposure / Q000009:adverse effects*; D006801:Humans; D011634:Public Health; D012307:Risk Factors
keywords: bioinformatics; data standards; environment-wide association studies; exposures; genomics