A new pharmacogenomic approach

Already some time on my desk – a highly interesting pharmacogenomics approach published in issue 1 of PLoS 1. By comparing the muscle transcriptome with the plasma lipidome the authors tried to map a suspected pathway leading to statin-induced myopathy. The nice thing with pharmacogenetics studies are the clear on-off induction of pathways. If we will finally be able to get each relevant metabolite and map it to its RNA (or even its SNPs), this will be a big step of in silico biology.

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More on the human metabolome was reported in Nature news: the metabolic profile of meat eaters is different from vegetarians and it seems to be already possible to fingerprint rat urine to predict which rats would suffer from liver damage by paracetamol. Yea, yea.