Toxicogenomics: A Review

Toxicogenomics is a rapidly developing discipline that promises to aid scientists in understanding the molecular and cellular effects of chemicals in biological systems. This field encompasses global assessment of biological effects using technologies such as DNA microarrays or high throughput NMR and protein expression analysis.

Toxicogemomics is the evolving science which measures the global gene expression changes in biological samples exposed to toxic agents and investigates the complex interaction between the genetic variability and environmental exposures on toxicological effects. DNA microarrays have become most popular and important method to measure the expression of mRNA level offering great potential for environmental or toxicological studies. Gene expression changes can possibly provide more sensitive, immediate, comprehensive maker of toxicity than typical toxicological endpoints such as morphological changes, carcinogenicity, and reproductive toxicity. In this regards, toxicogenomics includes genomicscale mRNA expression (transcriptomics), cell and tissue-wide protein expression (proteomics), metabolite profiling (metabonomics), and bioinformatics. These studies can be grouped as ''-omics'' study, which could be applied to various kinds of samples and species.