ABSTRACT
Modern toxicology has evolved signicantly in the last decade with the application of genomewide expression proling technologies that have created a hot new eld called toxicogenomics. Making this eld applicable for molecular biology analysis is the emergence of microarray technology, an approach that is now being widely applied in toxicological studies to measure the simultaneous expression of a large number of genes in a given sample in response to toxicity. This new discipline advances the information provided by conventional pharmacological and toxicological approaches and has the potential to contribute to in-depth investigation of the molecular mechanisms that may explain a toxicant’s mode of action. An array containing many DNA samples utilizes the ability of a given messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule to bind specically to, or hybridize to, the DNA template from which it originated, thereby scientists could determine, in a single experiment, the expression levels of thousands of genes within a single sample by measuring the amount of mRNA bound to each site on the array.
