The New Frontier In Toxicology and Environmental Health Science

Bioengineering and Environmental Health (BEH). It is described as the merger of engi-neering and the biological sciences. Within the division, a particular group of scientists are now bubbling with excitement. These scientists are known as toxicologists, and their excite-ment is over toxicogenomics, an application of microarray technology that promises to bring tox-icology to a new frontier. Microarray analysis just became a widely used biological tool in the late 1990s. It uses silicon or glass chips, capa-ble of being coated with dense, discrete spots of nucleic acids, which are termed “probes. ” A “target, ” fluorescent cDNA, RNA, or cRNA, can then be bound to the array of probes to determine the gene expression pattern–which genes ’ RNA products were indeed present in the “target ” sample.1 The target binds to the probe as a result of nucleic acid base pair-ing, also known as hybridization. This seemingly simple procedure allows scientists to screen ten