The use of omic technologies for biomarker development to trace functions of anabolic agents

The combat against misuse of growth promoting agents is a major topic in agricultural meat production and human sports. In routine screening, hormone residues of all known growth promoting agents are detected by immuno assays or chromatographical methods in combination with mass spectrometry. To overcome the detection by these routine screening methods new xenobiotic growth promoters and new ways of application were developed, e.g. the combination of different agents in hormone cocktails are employed. To enable an efficient tracing of misused anabolic substances it is necessary to develop new screening technologies for a broad range of illegal drugs including newly designed xenobiotic anabolic agents. The use of optic technologies like, transcriptomics, proteomics or metabolomics is a promising approach to discover the misuse of anabolic hormones by indirectly detecting their physiological action. With the help of biostatistical tools it is possible to extract the quested information from the data sets retrieved from the omic technologies. This review describes the potential of these omic technologies for the development of such new screening methods and presents recent literature in this field. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.