The new field of toxicogenomics presents a potentially powerful set of tools to better understand the health effects of exposures to toxicants in the environment. At the request of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Research Council assembled a committee to identify the benefits of toxicogenomics, the challenges to achieving them, and potential approaches to overcoming such challenges. The report concludes that realizing the potential of toxicogenomics to improve public health decisions will require a concerted effort to generate data, make use of existing data, and study data in new waysâ€"an effort requiring funding, interagency coordination, and data management strategies.

The new field of toxicogenomics presents a potentially powerful set of tools to better understand the health effects of exposures to toxicants in the environment. At the request of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Research Council assembled a committee to identify the benefits of toxicogenomics, the challenges to achieving them, and potential approaches to overcoming such challenges. The report concludes that realizing the potential of toxicogenomics to improve public health decisions will require a concerted effort to generate data, make use of existing data, and study data in new waysâ€"an effort requiring funding, interagency coordination, and data management strategies.

In the last decade and a half, great progress has been made in the development of concepts and models for mixture toxicity, both in human and environmental toxicology. However, due to their different protection goals, developments have often progressed in parallel but with little integration. Arguably the first book to clearly link ecotoxicology an

Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis. However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment. Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.

Scientific Frontiers in Developmental Toxicology and Risk Assessment reviews advances made during the last 10-15 years in fields such as developmental biology, molecular biology, and genetics. It describes a novel approach for how these advances might be used in combination with existing methodologies to further the understanding of mechanisms of developmental toxicity, to improve the assessment of chemicals for their ability to cause developmental toxicity, and to improve risk assessment for developmental defects. For example, based on the recent advances, even the smallest, simplest laboratory animals such as the fruit fly, roundworm, and zebrafish might be able to serve as developmental toxicological models for human biological systems. Use of such organisms might allow for rapid and inexpensive testing of large numbers of chemicals for their potential to cause developmental toxicity; presently, there are little or no developmental toxicity data available for the majority of natural and manufactured chemicals in use. This new approach to developmental toxicology and risk assessment will require simultaneous research on several fronts by experts from multiple scientific disciplines, including developmental toxicologists, developmental biologists, geneticists, epidemiologists, and biostatisticians.

Advances in molecular biology and toxicology are paving the way for major improvements in the evaluation of the hazards posed by the large number of chemicals found at low levels in the environment. The National Research Council was asked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to review the state of the science and create a far-reaching vision for the future of toxicity testing. The book finds that developing, improving, and validating new laboratory tools based on recent scientific advances could significantly improve our ability to understand the hazards and risks posed by chemicals. This new knowledge would lead to much more informed environmental regulations and dramatically reduce the need for animal testing because the new tests would be based on human cells and cell components. Substantial scientific efforts and resources will be required to leverage these new technologies to realize the vision, but the result will be a more efficient, informative and less costly system for assessing the hazards posed by industrial chemicals and pesticides.

Despite the many benefits of energy, most of which are reflected in energy market prices, the production, distribution, and use of energy causes negative effects. Many of these negative effects are not reflected in energy market prices. When market failures like this occur, there may be a case for government interventions in the form of regulations, taxes, fees, tradable permits, or other instruments that will motivate recognition of these external or hidden costs. The Hidden Costs of Energy defines and evaluates key external costs and benefits that are associated with the production, distribution, and use of energy, but are not reflected in market prices. The damage estimates presented are substantial and reflect damages from air pollution associated with electricity generation, motor vehicle transportation, and heat generation. The book also considers other effects not quantified in dollar amounts, such as damages from climate change, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security. While not a comprehensive guide to policy, this analysis indicates that major initiatives to further reduce other emissions, improve energy efficiency, or shift to a cleaner electricity generating mix could substantially reduce the damages of external effects. A first step in minimizing the adverse consequences of new energy technologies is to better understand these external effects and damages. The Hidden Costs of Energy will therefore be a vital informational tool for government policy makers, scientists, and economists in even the earliest stages of research and development on energy technologies.

With the advent of new technologies and acquired knowledge, the number of fields in omics and their applications in diverse areas are rapidly increasing in the postgenomics era. Such emerging fields—including pharmacogenomics, toxicogenomics, regulomics, spliceomics, metagenomics, and environomics—present budding solutions to combat global challenges in biomedicine, agriculture, and the environment. OMICS: Applications in Biomedical, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences provides valuable insights into the applications of modern omics technologies to real-world problems in the life sciences. Filling a gap in the literature, it offers a broad, multidisciplinary view of current and emerging applications of omics in a single volume. Written by highly experienced active researchers, each chapter describes a particular area of omics and the associated technologies and applications. Topics covered include: Proteomics, epigenomics, and pharmacogenomics Toxicogenomics and the assessment of environmental pollutants Applications of plant metabolomics Nutrigenomics and its therapeutic applications Microalgal omics and omics approaches in biofuel production Next-generation sequencing and omics technology for transgenic plant analysis Omics approaches in crop improvement Engineering dark-operative chlorophyll synthesis Computational regulomics Omics techniques for the analysis of RNA splicing New fields, including metagenomics, glycomics, and miRNA Breast cancer biomarkers for early detection Environomics strategies for environmental sustainability This timely book explores a wide range of omics application areas in the biomedical, agricultural, and environmental sciences. Throughout, it highlights working solutions as well as open problems and future challenges. Demonstrating the diversity of omics, it introduces readers to state-of-the-art developments and trends in omics-driven research.

Green toxicology is an integral part of green chemistry. One of the key goals of green chemistry is to design less toxic chemicals. Therefore, an understanding of toxicology and hazard assessment is important for any chemist working in green chemistry, but toxicology is rarely part of most chemists' education. As a consequence, chemists lack the toxicological lens necessary to view chemicals in order to design safer substitutions. This book seeks to fill that gap and demonstrate how a basic understanding of toxicology, as well as the tools of in silico and in vitro toxicology, can be an integral part of green chemistry. R&D chemists, product stewards, and toxicologists who work in the field of sustainability, can all benefit from integrating green toxicology principles into their work. Topics include in silico tools for hazard assessment, toxicity testing, and lifecycle considerations, this book aims to act as a bridge between green toxicologists and green chemists.

This book will serve as a primer for both laboratory and field scientists who are shaping the emerging field of molecular epidemiology. Molecular epidemiology utilizes the same paradigm as traditional epidemiology but uses biological markers to identify exposure, disease or susceptibility. Schulte and Perera present the epidemiologic methods pertinent to biological markers. The book is also designed to enumerate the considerations necessary for valid field research and provide a resource on the salient and subtle features of biological indicators.