In a story on NPR's "Morning Edition," Dean Jones, director of Emory's Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory, discusses his collaboration with California researchers on a study looking to see if there is evidence that environmental exposures in the uterus during pregnancy could account for some breast cancers later in life.

According to the story, Jones' lab "uses ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry to analyze tens of thousands of chemicals at once using just a drop of blood. His team has also developed computerized algorithms to analyze how the body processes the chemicals it is exposed to. The sum of those exposures to environmental risk factors over a lifetime is something that Jones and other researchers call the 'exposome.'"

Jones said that "sequencing the human genome was the easy part, now we're trying to sequence the human exposome." Jones' lab is part of the first exposome center funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.