About This Project

Due to the enormous usage of mobile phones throughout the world, it is important to understand the effect of mobile phone radiation on human health. We plan to use a next-generation sequencing approach to investigate if mobile phone radiation causes any gene mutation in normal human cells.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Mobile phones use electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Due to the enormous increase in mobile phone usage worldwide, it is important to determine the effect of mobile phone radiation on human health.

There has been constant debate in the public and academic institutions regarding the adverse health effect of mobile phone radiation. The WHO claimed that, in 2011, "no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use". However, at the same year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified mobile phone radiation as "possibly carcinogenic", which means that there could be some risk of carcinogenicity with the mobile phone radiation.

What is the significance of this project?

The significance of this project is to determine whether mobile phone radiation causes any gene mutations in normal human cells, and therefore will clarify if mobile phone radiation is associated with any risk of carcinogenicity.

Although previous studies have reported that mobile phone radiation may not have direct mutagenic effect, most of them were performed on individual genes. Due to the advances in next-generation sequencing technology, we now can investigate the mutagenic effect of mobile phone radiation on a global scale, meaning we are able to sequencing all the genes of a human genome to determine if there are any mutations or not.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to perform a comparative sequencing analysis of the genomes between normal cells exposed to long-term mobile phone radiation and those without exposure to mobile phone radiation. After statistical analysis of the sequencing data, we will be able to reveal if there are any gene mutations caused by long-term, heavy use of mobile phones, to the genome of the normal human cells.