Inside out

Every day, we are exposed to mixtures of chemicals at very low concentrations, from food, air, and consumer products. But what are these chemicals doing inside our bodies? In this talk, I will show how we can identify which proteins interact with chemicals inside cells, screening thousands of proteins at once. Without prior knowledge of the chemicals or their effects, this approach allows us to map the biological mechanisms that these chemicals may alter and explore how our exposome could relate to long-term health risks.

With the advent of de-extinction, science is attempting some of the most extreme physical alterations at the genomic level to date, and has certainly captured the public imagination. Typically (though not exclusively) the technology behind these initiatives involves taking the nearest living relative to the extinct species and then altering the appearance and behaviour to match that of the extinct species as much as possible. Depending on the degree of differences between the extant (living) and extinct (dead) species, this can mean considerable alterations, not only morphological but also physiological and behavioural in nature. For example, in the case of the woolly mammoth being de-extincted from the elephant, traits ranging from the long double-coated fur, greater subcutaneous fat, smaller ears and limbs, enlarged and twisted tusks, and wider feet are all different. In another example, the extinct passenger pigeon’s closest living relative is the band-tailed pigeon. In this case, this involves some morphological traits (longer tail and iridescent pink breast patch), but also large behavioural differences (the passenger pigeon bred in large colonies, and lived in huge flocks of hundreds of thousands of birds). Such extreme phenotypic modification is no small feat to perform, and asks the question if transgenic rewriting of the genome is actually feasible to induce such alterations in sufficient volume. The main issue is you can only actually change a relatively small number of regions, so then which regions should be selected? To test how feasible this is I will introduce a project where we will use a domestic chicken and try to turn it into a wild chicken, using a similar approach to that being used in de-extinction.