Every person has an individual chemical fingerprint. The composition of small molecules in the blood, such as fats or sugars, determines how our body reacts to external influences, which diseases we are susceptible to and how severe an illness will be. In an international collaboration with partners from Cambridge (UK), scientists from the Berlin Institute of Health at the Charité (BIH) have now discovered more than 300 regions in the genome that contribute to this individual chemical fingerprint. They have now published their results in Nature Medicine.