Identifying radiation exposure biomarkers from mouse blood transcriptome.

Ionising radiation is a pleiotropic stress agent that may induce a variety of adverse effects. Molecular biomarker approaches possess promise to assess radiation exposure, however, the pleiotropic nature of ionising radiation induced transcriptional responses and the historically poor inter-laboratory performance of omics-derived biomarkers serve as barriers to identification of unequivocal biomarker sets. Here, we present a whole-genome survey of the murine transcriptomic response to physiologically relevant radiation doses, 2 Gy and 8 Gy. We used this dataset with the Random Forest algorithm to correctly classify independently generated data and to identify putative metabolite biomarkers for radiation exposure.