Transcriptomic profiling for safety and toxicity evaluation of nutraceuticals

Abstract

Abstract The complex chemical nature of herbal dietary supplements makes it difficult to evaluate their efficacy and safety. The integration of traditional toxicological approaches with high-throughput molecular profiling technologies provides new approaches to investigate alterations in gene/protein activities and the biological pathways/functions that respond to xenobiotic compounds in animals and humans. This chapter provides examples of the application of transcriptomic profiling in evaluating the safety and toxicity of dietary supplements. These examples from our laboratories include a study where functional genomics analysis led to conventional toxicological research, a study illustrating functional genomics ability to distinguish the carcinogenic effects in target and nontarget tissues, a study highlighting common mechanisms of action discovered in cross-species analysis of gene expression, and a study integrating gene expression changes with a mechanistic pathway analysis.