toxicogenomics

Toxicogenomics is a subdiscipline of pharmacology that deals with the collection, interpretation, and storage of information about gene and protein activity within a particular cell or tissue of an organism in response to exposure to toxic substances. Toxicogenomics combines toxicology with genomics or other high-throughput molecular profiling technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Toxicogenomics endeavors to elucidate the molecular mechanisms evolved in the expression of toxicity, and to derive molecular expression patterns (i.e., molecular biomarkers) that predict toxicity or the genetic susceptibility to it.

==Pharmaceutical research== In pharmaceutical research, toxicogenomics is defined as the study of the structure and function of the genome as it responds to adverse xenobiotic exposure. It is the toxicological subdiscipline of pharmacogenomics, which is broadly defined as the study of inter-individual variations in whole-genome or candidate gene single-nucleotide polymorphism maps, haplotype markers, and alterations in gene expression that might correlate with drug responses. Though the term toxicogenomics first appeared in the literature in 1999, it was by that time already in common use within the pharmaceutical industry as its origin was driven by marketing strategies from vendor companies. The term is still not universally accepted, and others have offered alternative terms such as chemogenomics to describe essentially the same field of study.