By Alison Caldwell
When she arrived in Beijing as a new university student, Prof. Yu-Ying He was struck by the contrast to the rural area where she grew up, and especially the amount of pollution in the air, a major issue during that time.
“It constantly made me think about how different environments can lead to differences in our health, even when we’re working with a very similar genome,” she said. “It made me wonder how the biology works when we’re exposed to certain chemicals or radiation or even biological factors, like a virus. These things can put an imprint on our bodies, but we don’t always know what the long-term effects will be.”
These questions drove He to pursue her PhD in chemistry, seeking to understand how differences in the air and water of different environments and radiation can affect change at the molecular level.
“Of course, a lot of toxins are chemicals,” she said, “So that gives me some advantage when looking into biochemical interactions and working to improve our understanding of environmental health in a broader sense.”
Now, as a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, He investigates how environmental exposures to toxins can trigger changes in a cell’s epitranscriptome, rendering it more vulnerable to cancer. While some may be familiar with the epigenome, which encompasses the modifications that influence how DNA is transcribed, the epitranscriptome is a map of the modifications made to the RNA within a cell, which can affect how and which proteins are produced.