INVITED AND SPECIAL SESSIONS
Wednesday, October 26
8:00 PM-10:00 PM
Concurrent Invited Sessions I (12-18)
SESSION 17 - Toxicogenomics: A Strategy for Dissecting Toxicologic Exposures and Genetic Contributions to Complex Human Disease
Ballroom E-H
Co-Moderators: David A. Schwartz, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC; and Marcy C. Speer, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC
"Environmental exposures can simplify complex human disease by narrowing the pathophysiologic phenotype." Human geneticists have long been aware of the interplay between genetics and the environment and how these interactions modulate the expression of a phenotype. New genomics approaches, including microarray expression analysis and proteomics assessments, are driving the novel field of toxicogenomics, aimed at identifying new genes and pathways that are relevant to environmentally-influenced diseases such as asthma, cancer, dementia, and birth defects. The toxicogenomic approach utilizes model systems to identify genes that are concordantly regulated across experimental systems such as C. elegans, zebrafish, rat and mouse when challenged with the same agent. Genes identified from these comparative approaches can then be tested as potential susceptibility genes in humans. In this session, general toxicologic approaches will be described in the context of WormTox, NIEHS's publicly available database of gene expression differences following environmental exposures to C. elegans. Then studies involving selenium and its chemoprotective effect on breast cancer in rat will be explored. Finally, human applications of this approach will focus on the importance of gene-environment interactions in neural tube defects and innate immunity. The identification of these environmentally-influenced genes and pathways opens new ground for approaches to gene identification in humans, along with the promise of genotype-specific clinical interventions.
8:00 PM WormTox: Strategies and resources for using C. elegans to identify candidate genes responsive to environmental exposures. Jonathan Freedman, Duke University, Durham, NC.
8:30 PM Selenium as a chemoprotective agent in rat mammary tumors. Helmut Zarbi, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA.
9:00 PM Environmental triggers for human neural tube defects. Marcy C. Speer, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC.
9:30 PM Gene-environment interactions in innate immunity: From mouse QTLs to human genomics. David A. Schwartz.
