Book Review: Toxicogenomics in Predictive Carcinogenicity

Toxicogenomics (TGx), a discipline of toxicology allows scientists to identify and characterize the genomic signatures of environmental toxicants, as well as use gene and protein expression profiles to study the relationship between exposure and disease outcome and understand gene-environment interactions. TGx considered as the fusion of three scientific fields—toxicology, molecular biology and bioinformatics. There are numerous applications of microarray technology in environmental genomics. By monitoring thousands of genes in cells simultaneously, DNA microarray technology provides the opportunities to characterize the gene expression patterns induced by environmental toxicants. This “omics” discipline offers direct comparison of expression values for a control against an altered condition revealing a set of biomarkers indicative of that altered state. Such a biomarker or a fingerprint can eventually be used as a tool to classify toxicant exposures and to predict the mode of action of toxicant exposures. The data obtained from TGx will definitely save time and cost. TGx approaches might avoid or minimize the use of animals in toxicology studies and enable us to perform certain human studies that could not be carried out at overtly toxic exposures. The book contains 503 pages of text and references with 14 chapters. According to the Preface, the book was conceptualized in an Applied Symposium at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society in Orlando, FL (USA) on September 19, 2014. However, the editors subsequently decided to focus more on predicting carcinogenicity. This is an enormous task which authors have successfully exercised in completing this important book.While the effort is commendable, it may be difficult to i predict cancer based on the gene signatures per se, as carcinogenesis is a complex process. Nevertheless, this book provides a collection of articles in the field of TGx which would be very useful to cancer biologists and toxicologists who intend to use genomics approaches. In Chapter 1, Michael D Waters, one of the two editors, introduces the topic of TGx and its use in predicting carcinogenicity. In addition, a thorough background on the application of –omics technologies in toxicology is also given. Several aspects of TGx are highlighted including genomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Separately, the concepts of predictive toxicology and predictive carcinogenicity are discussed using studies on different model systems. This chapter provides a good introduction to the book as well. In subsequent chapters, following topics are discussed in a timely and succinct way.