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TOXICOLOGICAL HIGHLIGHT |
Putting the Fun Into Functional Toxicogenomics
Laboratory of Pharmacology and Chemistry, National Institute of Environmental Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709
1 For correspondence via e-mail: cunning1@niehs.nih.gov.
Received May 26, 2006; accepted May 30, 2006
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The term "toxicogenomics" was first coined in 1999 to describe the marriage of toxicology and genomics (Nuwaysir et al., 1999
). Since then, the field of toxicogenomics has undergone a rapid and uneven surge of growth. Driven by the promise of whole-genome gene expression analysis by microarray, toxicogenomics has been advanced as the tool for improved mechanistic toxicology screens, more sensitive and earlier toxicity discovery, drug and chemical safety assessments, and new drug discovery assays (Hayes and Bradfield, 2005). However, it quickly became evident to scientists conducting toxicogenomic studies that making sense of enormous data sets from microarray studies would require new tools and new approaches in order to