代谢组学技术在毒理学研究中的应用进展

Progress in the application of metabonomics technology in toxicology research

代谢组学是继基因组学、转录组学及蛋白质组学之后发展起来的一门组学学科,其研究对象是生命活动链条下游的代谢物的集合——代谢组。虽然已经经过了十几年的发展,但代谢组学在实验技术、数据分析及结果的注释各个环节都还有许多问题需要加以解决。任何外源性物质的作用都会导致生物体内代谢平衡的破坏,从而使得体内代谢物质发生变化。因此,利用代谢组学技术研究药物的毒理学性质自然就成为代谢组学的主要应用领域之一,也是应用最早的领域。代谢组学在先导化合物的早期毒性筛选、药物的临床前毒性以临床药物的毒性评价等方面都已经得到了广泛的应用,所研究的对象涵盖了人体、实验动物、细胞和斑马鱼等替代模型。代谢组学结果的深入阐释也在发展之中。本文对代谢组学技术及其在毒理学研究中的应用进展进行了综述。

Metabonomics is a new member in the omics field following the development of genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics, with its research object being the collection of metabolites-metabolome, the downstream products of life. Even with the development of past decade, there are still many problems to be solved in the area of experimental techniques, data analysis and results annotation. Any xenobiotics would cause the disturbance of homeostasis of organisms, resulting in the changes of metabolites. Consequently, toxicology is one of the major application areas of metabolomics, and is the earliest one. Metabolomics has been widely used in the early toxicological screening of leads, preclinical and clinical toxicology of drugs in animals and human, as well as in surrogate models such as cell lines and zebrafish. Annotation techniques for metabolic data have also been developed. In this paper, the development of metabolomic techniques and its application in toxicology are reviewed.