Integrative toxicogenomics-based approach to risk assessment of heavy metal mixtures/complexes: strategies and challenges

Abstract

Human exposure to metallic elements rang ing from single metal ionic salt, metal compounds, and metal mixtures that may occur naturally, as well as from human activities and industrial applications. Some metals including arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, and nickel in both single element and mixture forms render confounding health effects and ultimately cause cancer. Studies of heavy metalme diated global aberration using nontargeted multiple toxicogenomic technologies might help to elucidate environmentally relevant disorders, as well as to mon itor biomarker of exposure and predict the health risk toward environmental toxicants. We describe recent toxicogenomic studies on heavy metal mixtures as well as relevant mechanism of toxicity and molecu lar signatures. On the basis of system toxicology ap proach, integrative toxicogenomic and bioinformatic tools might represent the biological pathways linked to disorders. We also strongly suggest that the toxicog enomic data can be adopted to risk assessment pro cess. Furthermore, we mention challenges in utility of toxicogenomic studies data to risk assessment process of toxicity of metal mixtures. Overall, we realize that application and interpretation of toxicogenomic data regarding to their strengths and weaknesses would po tentiate chemical risk assessment.

ACN9 Regulates the Inflammatory Responses in Human Bronchial Epithelial Cells

“…We investigated the genomic response to Cd exposure in bronchial epithelial cells after ACN9 silencing using microarray to understand the molecular mechanism of ACN9 24 . In our study, several genes were notably upregulated or down-regulated in ACN9 knockdown cells with or without Cd stress as compared to that in control cells.…”