by Stephanie Kiesow-Edoh
- Could you give us a brief description of your lab’s research?
I have led a lab at UCLA for 12 years. Our main focus is to understand broadly how the environment makes us sick. It is clear that environmental pollution is detrimental to our health. But what we don’t understand is how exposure to that pollution can alter our biology and eventually lead to disease.
In our lab we look at different types of environmental pollution – we don’t necessarily have one specific pollutant or chemical of interest. We work with arsenic, forever chemicals (PFAS), alcohol, e-cigarette products, etc. (essentially a wide variety of exposures that people would be subjected to). Then, we look at what happens to cells when they are exposed to environmental contaminants and we try to understand how they perturb the function of these cells.
With regard to reproductive health, we are trying to understand how the environment alters the process of reproduction (e.g., how the environment decreases fertility, more specifically how the cells differentiate and how the biology gets altered and then leads to a decrease in fertility), which is often very hard to examine directly in humans (and sometimes in animal models, too) and we have to be very innovative in how we do this in the lab. We are currently using newer tools that model reproductive processes with stem cells. - What led you to study this topic?
What was fascinating to me was how little we understand about female reproductive health and pregnancy. From the environmental side, I also wanted to see my work being applied to real life scenarios. The reality is that we are subjected to a soup of chemicals that we have mainly produced ourselves. I hope that if we show people the dramatic impact of these chemicals on the environment and on their own health, it will perhaps motivate all of us to try to preserve our environment to a much higher degree. - What has surprised you the most while conducting this research?
The two things that have shocked me the most are how many chemicals humans have produced over the years, somewhere between 100,000- 350,000 chemicals, and how little we know about many of these chemicals.
The most studied chemical (that our lab studies as well) is arsenic. We’ve known that arsenic has long been used as a poison and it doesn’t just cause cancer, it affects every organ including reproductive organs. However, there is no unifying model explaining how arsenic does this. To me, it is a clear sign that while we understand quite a bit about arsenic, we do not know exactly how it works in the body, and there are many more chemicals we know nothing about.
Additionally, studying the chemicals found in the blood of pregnant people (in California) has been particularly insightful. Through this work we identified chemicals that pregnant people are exposed to. Following this, we evaluated several chemicals using our reproductive assays in the lab. From this, we identified chemical of high concern to pregnant people and their babies. Specifically, we identified high levels of Quaternary Ammonium Compounds (or QACs) – chemicals which are in a ton of cleaning products. QACs are becoming increasingly important to study because they are reproductively toxic. And yet, when you look at the literature, we know so little about them.
Read more about QACs here. - What did you focus on during your sabbatical in France?
In France, I wanted to learn and apply a new level of study called 3-D genome organization to our work. The genome is a DNA sequence and the epigenome follows that (adding this on or around the genome without modifying the sequence). However, the DNA sequence is not just a linear piece of molecule, is actually folded in a very specific fashion, which helps regulate how some genes get expressed and some genes do not get expressed. With this new level of study, we want to assess whether the environment deregulates the folding of the genome and therefore how genes are regulated.
When I was in France, my host, Giacomo Cavalli, published in Nature the first case of a fully epigenetically-induced cancer. He was able to modify very briefly the epigenome (in flies), and then initiate the cancer. This is almost exactly what arsenic does (i.e., it causes really high rates of cancer without causing DNA mutations). We would like to make the parallels between his findings and our research on arsenic.
Resources
For more information regarding the use of safe products, please check out the Environmental Working Group website