Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, National Center for Toxicological Research, US Food and Drug Administration, Jefferson, Arkansas 72079, USA.
Toxicol Sci. 2012 Dec;130(2):217-28. doi: 10.1093/toxsci/kfs223. Epub 2012 Jul 12.
Toxicogenomics enjoyed considerable attention as a ground-breaking addition to conventional toxicology assays at its inception. However, the pace at which toxicogenomics was expected to perform has been tempered in recent years. Next to cost, the lack of advanced knowledge discovery and data mining tools significantly hampered progress in this new field of toxicological sciences. Recently, two of the largest toxicogenomics databases were made freely available to the public. These comprehensive studies are expected to stimulate knowledge discovery and development of novel data mining tools, which are essential to advance this field. In this review, we provide a concise summary of each of these two databases with a brief discussion on the commonalities and differences between them. We place our emphasis on some key questions in toxicogenomics and how these questions can be appropriately addressed with the two databases. Finally, we provide a perspective on the future direction of toxicogenomics and how new technologies such as RNA-Seq may impact this field.
毒理基因组学在其诞生之初作为常规毒理学检测的突破性补充而受到相当关注。然而，近年来毒理基因组学的预期进展速度已经放缓。除了成本之外，缺乏先进的知识发现和数据挖掘工具也极大地阻碍了毒理学科学这一新领域的发展。最近，两个最大的毒理基因组学数据库向公众免费开放。这些全面的研究有望促进知识发现和新型数据挖掘工具的开发，这对于推动这一领域的发展至关重要。在这篇综述中，我们简要总结了这两个数据库中的每一个，并简要讨论了它们之间的异同。我们重点介绍了毒理基因组学中的一些关键问题，以及如何使用这两个数据库来恰当地解决这些问题。最后，我们对毒理基因组学的未来发展方向以及 RNA-Seq 等新技术如何影响这一领域提供了一个视角。
