Genes can tell tales about you—but the chemicals you scatter around each day may reveal even more
tell tales about you, from who your ancestors were to how likely you are to develop a range of diseases. And it seems probable that in the future they will tell more: your personality type, perhaps, or your intelligence. For these reasons, many countries have laws limiting what use employers and insurance companies can make of such information.
There are, however, a lot of information sources out there, in the form of publicly available metabolite databases. And last year a team led by Pieter Dorrestein of University of California, San Diego, invented a way, which they call a metabolite search engine, of linking them up so that a sample can be compared simultaneously with the contents of all of them.
Such information can reveal a lot. Your god? Regular exposure to burning incense, and thus frequent visits to a church that uses it, will be detectable from the chemicals in the smoke. Not a Christian? Kosher and halal diets are detectable by the absence of metabolites from certain foodstuffs those diets forbid.
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