Gene expression profiling in the rat thymus exposed to 2-butanone oxime, m-xylylenediamine, 3-cyanopyridine, 2-(2-aminoethylamino)ethanol and tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol. CIBEX accession: CBX184. Rattus norvegicus

Toxicology principally investigates the influence of chemical substances onto living organisms by use of biological indicators detected by experimental methods including biochemical, immunological, and pathological approaches that require method-specific multiple platforms. In contrast, recently developed genomics enables to employ thousands of genes as parameters to assess diverse biological phenomena on a single platform such as gene expression profiling. Thus, the integration of genomics into toxicology should exploit novel fields for the biological assessment of substances, describing alterations after exposure of substances to animals or cultured cells with multiple parameters in a single platform across diverse specimens. In this study, we administered five chemical substances 2-butanone oxime, m-xylylenediamine, 3-cyanopyridine, 2-(2-aminoethylamino)ethanol and tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol independently to male for 28 days repeatedly, prepared multiple tissue samples of each animal, and comprehensively investigated gene expression levels in the thymus with DNA microarrays containing probes representing approximately 11,000 species of rat transcripts. We expect the data obtained in this study may contribute to establish novel accurate approaches for the assessment of chemical substances existing and generated in the future by comparing with the previously accumulated findings obtained by repeated dose 28-day oral administration to rats.

毒理学（Toxicology）主要依托生物指标，通过生物化学、免疫学、病理学等实验方法探究化学物质对生物体的影响，此类方法需依托适配各自技术特点的多平台体系。与之相对，近年发展成熟的基因组学（genomics）可将数千个基因作为评估参数，在单一平台上解析多样的生物学现象，例如基因表达谱分析。因此，将基因组学与毒理学交叉融合，有望开辟化学物质生物学评估的全新研究领域：借助单平台多参数手段，系统解析不同标本中化学物质暴露于动物或培养细胞后的分子变化。本研究选取2-丁酮肟（2-butanone oxime）、间苯二甲胺（m-xylylenediamine）、3-氰基吡啶（3-cyanopyridine）、2-(2-氨基乙基氨基)乙醇（2-(2-aminoethylamino)ethanol）以及四氢糠醇（tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol）五种化学物质，对雄性大鼠开展为期28天的重复染毒实验；随后采集每只受试大鼠的多组织样本，并采用搭载约11000种大鼠转录本探针的DNA微阵列（DNA microarray），全面检测胸腺组织中的基因表达水平。本研究所得数据可与既往基于大鼠28天经口重复染毒的累积研究数据进行比对，有望为现有及未来新型化学物质的安全性评估构建精准可靠的全新技术路径。