Dr. Amy Nett: Yeah, that’s a fair way of looking at it, but the exposome … Chris has the great diagram of the exposome that explains it a little bit more, and I’m trying to see if we can pull up the picture of the exposome… If you do have more questions about this, again, if you go to Week One, there’s a great book that Chris recommends, and it’s called The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance, by Nessa Carey. That could be something that if you’re interested in more of the nuances of epigenetics, you might want to consider reading that book. Again, look through the resources and see what fits for you, but that’s probably going to be the most detailed approach.
When we’re talking about the exposome, we are talking about all of the pieces of our environment that are affecting our genetics. The exposome includes both our genome and epigenome, and basically what he’s saying is how the exposome interacts with our genome and our epigenome. The exposome is largely the environment, and he talks about the different pieces of the environment, so he talks about, I believe, the specific and the general, so you have the diet, the lifestyle, you have the air pollution, toxins, that sort of thing. That’s looking at the very-big-picture exposome, and then how the exposome affects or interacts with our genes and our epigenetics.