ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the reader a cursory introduction to several fundamental aspects of toxicogenomic analysis. It describes the distinguishing features of predictive vs. mechanistic approaches. The chapter aims to serve as a bridge between general aspects of expression profiling analysis and the recent applications of expression profiling to problems in toxicology. A better fit for the specific needs in the exploratory field of toxicogenomics, however, can be found in the methods for transcriptional profiling which allow for the simultaneous analysis of thousands of genes, thus providing the researcher with a much broader view of the transcriptome. In general, transcription profiling technologies can be classified into closed and open systems. Databases for toxicologically important species such as dogs and monkeys are sparse to nonexistent, thus limiting the use of microarray experiments for their analysis. Therefore, the main focus of microarray-based experiments in the field of toxicogenomics has inevitably been on human, mouse, and rat to date.
