Toxicoinformatics: The Master Key for Toxicogenomics

The current vision of toxicogenomics is the development of methods or platforms to predict toxicity of un characterized chemicals by using '-omics' information in pre-clinical stage. Because each chemical has different ADME (absorption, distribution, mechanism, excretion) and experimental animals have lots of variation, precise prediction of chemical's toxicity based on '-omics' information and toxicity data of known chemicals is very difficult problem. So, the importance of bioinformatics is more emphasized on toxicogenomics than other functional genomics studies because these problems can not be solved only with experiments. Thus, toxicoinformatics covers all information-based analytical methods from gene expression (bioinformatics) to chemical structures (cheminformatics) and it also deals with the integration of wide range of experimental data for further extensive analyses. In this review, the overall strategy to toxicoinformatics is discussed.