In the past few decades, researchers have opened up the extraordinary world of microbes living on and within the human body, linking their influence to everything from rheumatoid arthritis to healthy brain function.
Yet we know comparatively little about the rich broth of microbes and chemicals in the air around us, even though we inhale them with every breath.
This struck Stanford University genomics researcher Michael Snyder as a major knowledge gap, as he pursued long-term research that involved using biological markers to understand and predict the development of disease in human test subjects. "The one thing that was missing was their exposure" to microbes and chemicals in the air, Snyder says. "Human health is clearly dependent not just on the genome or the microbiome, but on the environment. And sampling the environment was the big hole." ...read more>>>...
