General Information

Genomic integrity is a big picture concept which includes basically all the molecular genetic details of cells from RNAs to DNAs and the epigenetic marks. For the genomic integrity project the focus of the developing tools will be on directly quantifying of DNA damage. It can be used as a gateway, to demonstrate and raise awareness for everyone on the damage possible from many common substances or activities - on your own cells, your own genetic information. This topic that can be explored in several ways. Our way is the usage of freshly isolated cheek cells from individuals to do tests on DNA damaging compounds or activities.

‘Citizen scientists’ will be encouraged to first get baseline measures on their cells, then do a ‘trial’ and test its effects (i.e. daily swimming, chocolate or blueberry consumption, or some other activity). These would all provide ‘biomonitoring’ results about the given ‘intervention’ from baseline conditions. Another possibility with these assays are to perform ex situ experiments on your own cells, as mentioned, which would be giving acute genotoxicity information.

If enough people follow the ‘open source’ protocol(s) that we develop to follow controlled exposure protocols or test substances directly on their isolated cheek cells, and clearly significant effects are observed, we may even be able to corroborate or refute previous works in the literature.