Michael Ransom

An Introduction to Toxicogenomics is intended to serve as a primary source of information for a wide audience, ranging from undergraduates to established scientists and clinicians in the field of toxicology. Since the advent of cDNA microarrays, oligonucleotide array technology, and gene chip analyses in the last decade, genomics has revolutionized the entire field of biomedical research. Toxicologists immediately recognized the impact that the new subdiscipline of toxicogenomics could have on the study of drug toxicity and rapidly embraced this technology as one of the bright potential futures of toxicological analysis. This textbook is thus an attempt to consolidate the concepts underlying this new field and introduce them to the very population of scientists who will use toxicogenomic approaches in their upcoming research endeavors.

Gathering together leading authors and scientists at the forefront of the field, An Introduction to Toxicogenomics provides a comprehensive overview of this new discipline. With a focus on toxicology, it introduces the basic principles of genomic analysis and explains how it fits into the field of biomedical research. These discussions provide an overview to the actual mechanics of the analyses themselves and offer insights on handling and quality control. Then the book features an important section on the basics of data analysis and clustering methods such as genetic algorithms. Finally, it covers the application of expression profiling in the field of toxicology and addresses the two fundamental types of analysis in detail, with sections dedicated to both mechanistic and predictive studies.