Concept of Toxicoproteomics in Identifying Biomarkers of Toxicant Action

Copyright: © 2011 Shukla Y. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Humans are often exposed to a variety of environmental toxicants that contribute to an individual’s risk for disease. Therefore, in toxicological research new approaches are required for effective screening of environmental risks on complex living systems. Laboratory data generated through several in vitro, in vivo and some clinical studies have supported that various environmental products produce a broad spectrum of adverse health effects including neurological disorders and cancer. However, the results of these studies are still contentious; nevertheless, their mechanism of action is clear. For identification of molecular signatures and methodical understandings of various environmental toxicants response in biological systems, toxicoproteomics is considered to be a valued approach. The cellular response to carcinogens/toxicants is complex, so to maintain genomic stability and prevent carcinogenesisthe network of events taking place in the cell needs to be determined and abundant efforts has been put in for this. There are well over 10,000 publications relating to applications of proteomics in the toxicology research. Toxicoproteomics has been enhanced by tools from proteomics, bioinformatics and other enabling high data technologies.