#Epigenetics #DNAme #GeneEnvironmentInteractions #PrenatalExposome #Epigenomics #Exposome

Finally, this was a team effort, and I am really grateful to have Dr. Keegan Korthauer and Dr. Michael Kobor mentoring me in this adventure! Also our wonderful collaborators, the invaluable members of the Kobor and Korthauer labs, and the titanic effort of the CHILD and PREDO teams and participants

🤓 If you’re curious, you can read the full article here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Feedback, questions, collaborations, and ideas for follow-up studies are of course welcomed!

🤔 What's missing?
Our work used data from Canadian and Finish newborn populations only. To get a better picture, we need studies in diverse populations and other age demographics! To facilitate that, RAMEN is freely available and designed so other researchers can apply it to new datasets!

🧐 Why this matters?
Understanding how early-life environments interact with genetics to become biologically embedded may help us:
- Better understand what could cause the variation of DNA methylation sites associated with diseases
- Improve how we study epigenetics in population health

Together, we generated a catalogue that gives us a better pictures of how the inherited DNA and prenatal experiences could act together to shape the epigenome from day one!

😲 What did we find?
🧬 Genetics is the biggest contributor overall in the population we studied, but environmental exposures still matter! Most DNA regions are influenced by both genetics and environment in additive or interactive ways
☀️ Regions influenced only by environment are rare in cord blood

Using cord blood data from over 1,600 newborns, we looked at regions of the genome where DNA methylation naturally varies from person to person. Then we asked how much of that variation is explained by:
🧬 Genetic differences
🌍 Prenatal environmental exposures
➕ A combination of the two above

We took this question to the epigenetics field and developed a new R package, RAMEN, to systematically dissect how much these factors contribute to the variability in DNA methylation.

Also, special shoutout to all the undergrad and high school students that presented their research in the poster sessions! It’s so inspiring to see the passion for science in younger students 🫶🏽

I’m very thankful with Dr. Karla Rubio and Dra. María Bringas for the invite and the incredible experience. I’m really excited to connect with the exposome community in my home country, and I’m looking forward to see this relevant field grow 🙌🏽 #EnviroEpiHealthMX

Finally, at the conference I talked about my research developing methods to do so, particularly in the context of estimating genome-wide gene-environment interactions in DNA methylation👨🏽‍💻

During the pre-congress workshop, I talked about gene-environment interactions, their relevance in precision medicine, and the challenges of studying them in the postgenomic era. I highlighted promising technologies that are allowing us to study this phenomenon in omic data sets

I’m very thankful to all the organizers for making this possible and for giving young people access to FREE cutting-edge science. Thank you for letting me join your scientific revolution. And thank you for sharing your week with me, future scientists 🫶🏽.

It was amazing to share my journey with so many younger people, help them in their next steps, and inspire them to follow their scientific dreams ⭐️.

The rest of the students participated in one of the other 8 workshops offered, and learnt incredible stuff from young researchers from Oxford, UNAM, NASA, INAOE, Stanford, UAEM and UdeM. From engineering their own robots 🤖, to transforming their own bacteria 🦠, and studying the galaxies 🌌.

I’m really proud of the students in my workshop, they assimilated very complex concepts in just a week! Not only the biology of aging, but coding too, and creating their first machine learning model! 👨🏽‍💻👩🏽‍💻

Me and my students spent an amazing week learning about epigenetics, aging, and machine learning 🤓. By the end of the workshop, we trained 3 epigenetic clocks, and calculated the epigenetic accelerated aging in cancer samples! 🧬

❤️ Finally, I want to thank everyone involved in this work! Particularly, I would like to thank to the families and staff involved in the CHILD and PREDO studies. And to my amazing supervisors @keegankorthauer.bsky.social and Dr. Michael Kobor for shaping this work with me.