Abstract
Toxicology is a hybrid science, drawing on diverse disciplines including physiology, chemistry, biochemistry and pharmacology as the core subjects, and developments in toxicology are directly related to advances made in these component sciences. For example, early toxicology was essentially grossly observational and generally descriptive in nature, but with the emergence of chemical and biochemical approaches, toxicologists were able to rationalise toxic responses to drugs and chemicals at a mechanistic level, thus placing hazard identification and risk assessment on a more rational and scientific basis. The explosion of molecular biology and its associated techniques over the past decade has been stunning and toxicologists have been well aware of the power of molecular biology approaches in dissecting out mechanisms of xenobiotic toxicity. A precise definition of molecular biology is the science that deals with molecular genetics as it relates to DNA and RNA. However a more general and toxicologically-relevant description would be the study of biological processes at the molecular level.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Gibson, G.G. (1995). Molecular Biology Approaches to Cell Toxicology. In: Galli, C.L., Marinovich, M., Goldberg, A.M. (eds) Modulation of Cellular Responses in Toxicity. NATO ASI Series, vol 93. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79872-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79872-6_2
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