Omics in mechanistic and predictive toxicology

Abstract

High-throughput omics strategies delineate the molecular mechanism of toxicity, predict the toxicity of newer drugs and chemicals, and identify individuals at high risks on the basis of expression patterns of messenger ribonucleic acids, genes, and proteins, and detection of intermediary metabolites. Despite being a developing country, India is one of the fastest growing nations in the usages and applications of omics technologies. Several differentially expressed genes and proteins under various pathological and toxicant-exposed conditions have been identified, and many association studies on genetic polymorphisms with toxicant-induced diseases have been conducted for the predictive and mechanistic purposes. To date, omics-driven approaches have identified some novel fingerprints associated with disease risk/protection and prediction of toxicity of newer chemicals. Although the contributions of such findings in the mechanistic toxicology have been immense, predictive values of these findings in toxicology have been limited. In this review, the current status of omics-based research and its future possibilities at the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (IITR), Lucknow, India, have been discussed.

Keywords::

• Mechanistic and predictive toxicology
• microarray
• omics
• proteomics
• single nucleotide polymorphism

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge University Grants Commission, New Delhi for providing research fellowship to Seema Singh and Naveen Kumar Singhal and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi to Garima Srivastava. The IITR communication number of this article is 2792.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.