Seminar Series 2021 – Dr. Carole Yauk

• In-person event

• Contact
• biology@cunet.carleton.ca

Title: Translational Toxicogenomics to Advance Regulatory Decision-making

Description: International regulatory authorities have emphasized an urgent need to dramatically improve the efficiency of toxicological assessment of environmental chemicals to address the thousands of legacy chemicals in our environment and the hundreds of new substances produced annually. Proposed paradigm changes also indicate a need for mechanistic information to improve understanding of cross-species relevance of toxicological effects. Genomics has been at the centre of these efforts over the past decade or more. In this presentation I will discuss how my laboratory is pairing state of the art genomic technologies (e.g., whole genome sequencing, RNA-sequencing, high-throughput transcriptional profiling) with powerful bioinformatic pipelines to inform the molecular alterations induced by chemical exposures in rodent models and human cells in vitro. Our tools include transcriptomic biomarkers that accurately predict toxicological effects, error-corrected next-generation sequencing for mutation analysis, and new analytical pipelines for data interpretation in a risk assessment framework. I will discuss how we are defining context of use of our new tools and building confidence in the approaches through validation exercises and case studies undertaken with regulatory partners. The work sets the stage for risk assessments of the future.