The concept of the exposome encompasses the totality of exposures from a variety of external and internal sources across an individual's life course. The wealth of existing spatial and contextual data makes it appealing to characterize individuals' external exposome to advance our understanding of environmental determinants of health. However, the spatial and contextual exposome is very different from other exposome factors measured at the individual-level as spatial and contextual exposome data are more heterogenous with unique correlation structures and various spatiotemporal scales. These distinctive characteristics lead to multiple unique methodological challenges across different stages of a study. This article provides a review of the existing resources, methods, and tools in the new and developing field for spatial and contextual exposome-health studies focusing on four areas: (1) data engineering, (2) spatiotemporal data linkage, (3) statistical methods for exposome-health association studies, and (4) machine- and deep-learning methods to use spatial and contextual exposome data for disease prediction. A critical analysis of the methodological challenges involved in each of these areas is performed to identify knowledge gaps and address future research needs.
For years, the biochemical processes that are triggered by harmful and non-harmful stimuli at the central nervous system level have been extensively studied by the scientific community through numerous techniques and animal models. For example, one of these techniques is the use of immediate expression genes, which is a useful, accessible, and reliable method for observing and quantifying cell activation. It has been shown that both the c-fos gene and its protein c-Fos have rapid activation after stimulus, with the length of time that they remain active depending on the type of stimulus and the activation time depending on the stimulus and the structure studied. Fos requires the participation of other genes (such as c-jun) for its expression (during hetero-dimer forming). c-Fos dimerizes with c-Jun protein to form factor AP-1, which promotes the transcription of various genes. The production and removal of c-Fos is part of cellular homeostasis, but its overexpression results in increased cell proliferation. Although Fos has been used as a marker of cellular activity since the 1990s, which molecular mechanism participates in the regulation of the expression of this protein is still unknown because the gene and the protein are not specific to neurons or glial cells. For these reasons, this work has the objective of gathering information about this protein and its use in neuroscience.