On Saturday October 18, 2008, the workshop entitled “‘Omics—Application and Impacts on Genotoxicity Assessment” was held. The workshop was organized as part of the New Technologies Special Interest Group to help introduce the society to current and rapidly developing technologies. The session was divided into two sections and was very well attended. The six speakers, were selected to provide a broad level of scientific experience in the areas of Genomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics. At the end of the session a brief discussion was held to allow the participants to debate the pros and cons of varying scientific approaches for addressing genotoxicity assessments. A very brief synopsis for each of the speakers follows:
Dr. Paul Van Hummelen, from the Microarray Facility, VIB, Belgium.opened the first half of the session with a presentation titled
“Current State-of-the-Art of Genomics in Toxicology.” This talk addressed the ability of transcriptomics to addressits usefulness in toxicology. Dr. The transcript analysis presented illustrated that toxicogenomics could provide additional information on the mode of action for drug testing.
The second talk. was given by Dr. Brent W. Segelke, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, on “Practical Applications of Structural Genomics Technologies.” Dr. Segelke introduced the concept of structural genomics and was followed by a description of current approaches for solving new structures based on linkage to DNA sequence information. The presentation further highlighted the growth in informatics tools for structural biologist to help identify the function of genes annotated with unknown function and suggest there role in larger proteins networks and pathways.
The final talk of the first half of the session was given by Dr. Olga Kovalchuk, from the University of Lethbridge, Canada. Her talk was titled “Understanding epigenetics using high-throughput technologies.” This talk highlighted the recent growth in understanding in the role of chromatin structure using novel technologies to decipher DNA methylation, histone modification and cellular regulatory control using micro-RNA. Importantly, many of these techniques are readily available to bench-scientist.
After the Coffee break, the fourth speaker Dr. Chris Becker from PPD Biomarker Discovery Sciences, LLC, presented on the “Recent Advances in Proteomics and Metabolomics.” Dr. Becker gave an overview of how current measurements for proteomics and metabolomics are made, and some particular new advances.He discussed the basics for use of liquid-chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) on high resolution equipment with a label-free quantification for profiling studies for discovery.
The next speaker Dr. Michael Milburn from Metabolon, gave a talk entitled “Metabolomics and its Applications to Improve Drug Safety.” Dr. Milburn started his presentation with a brief introduction on the handling of samples and proprietary software used for global and whole pathway biochemical analysis. Dr. Milburn eluted to the adoption and applications of metabolomics as a
technology and presented a few case studies as examples.
Dr. Sury Vulimiri, the final speaker in the workshop, presented the results obtained from an in vitro study where-in a metabolomic approach was used as a screening tool to evaluate conventional and novel tobacco products. Dr. Vulimiri’s presentation was titled “A Metabolomic Approach to Study the Effects of Cigarette Smoke in Human Lung Epithelial Cells.” Dr. Vulimiri concluded his presentation offering future directions of metabolomics and its use as a technology in advancing the science of the assessment of environmental risks to human health.
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