Integrative approach for micro-RNA toxicology

The mission of toxicogenomic is the collection, strorage and analysis of all those information that allow the screening of the effects of toxicant compound in a specific body compartment and tissue or a whole body level. The 'omic' have extended the capability to investigate the molecular mechanism of chemical toxicity but the knowledge is mainly focused on acute poisoning less known about log term exposure at concentration under a critical toxicity dosage. It is important to underline that environmental contamination is not dependent by human productive activities but also the contamination is also related with human life style. It has been demonstrated, for instance, that consumption of grilled meat introduce hydrocarbons derived not only from burned wood but also from thermal decomposition of meat. Another source of toxicant is the smoke. Cigarettes and cigars are sources of mixture of contaminants that, in a prolonged use of these leisure tools, induces severe diseases such as cardiovascular diseases or cancer. The advancement of biomedical researches have unraveled the urgent need of integration. In the past each research field has operated in a quite independent way to the other areas. Now the discovery is absolutely dependent by the convergence of different complimentary disciplines. In toxicogenomic the efficiency of multidisciplinary integration is the key to obtain relevant results that could be really used to support the definition of new safety rules or to improve the application of chemopreventive approaches. It rather evident that Informatics infrastructure play a pivotal role in this research area. The development of toxicogenomic support system is not disjoint by the use all those computation instruments such as GRID, web mining or knowledge discovery that allow to retrieve and mine a complex set of heterogeneous information. The figure below roughly summarize the foremost elements for integrative toxicogenomic