Interplay between genes and social environment: from epigenetics to precision medicine

作者：Sabrina Caporali, Simone Russo, Marcel Leist, Petra H. Wirtz, Ivano Amelio · 发表于：Cell Death Discovery · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s41420-025-02580-z · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Health, Environment, Cognitive Aging、Nutrition, Genetics, and Disease、Epigenetics and DNA Methylation

Natural and prolonged exposure to environmental factors substantially influences human physiology throughout life at the molecular and functional level. Gene expression, signal transduction, and cellular processes are altered by exposure, while influencing onset of several diseases such as obesity, cancer, and autoimmune disorders. In biomedicine, deconvoluting the relationship between genetic predispositions and environmental factors (GxE) remains a significant challenge, as genetics alone cannot predict an individual’s biological response to a specific environmental exposure. Cells, organs, and tissues can retain a “memory” of previous exposures, which, when combined with developmental and aging factors, create an epigenetic pattern that influences future responses [ 1 ]. Therefore, GxE interplay cannot be solely unravelled by examining genetics alone, a detailed understanding of cellular status can only be provided by considering epigenetic patterns. Based on this, we recently proposed the concept of an “epigenetic score metre,” a tool that can disentangle the relationship between genetic and environmental influences [ 2 ].