Development of mRNA patterns for screening of anabolic steroids in bovine and primate tissues

In the EU the use of anabolic agents in animal husbandry is forbidden since 1988. To control this ban of anabolic agents in animal production, hormone residues are detected in different tissues. To enable an efficient tracing of unknown misused anabolic substances it is necessary to develop new technologies to screen for a broad range of illegal drugs including newly designed xenobiotic anabolic agents. The aim of this thesis was to proof the potential of the determination of gene expression changes for the development of a screening method to detect the misuse of anabolic steroid hormones. It could be shown that changes in gene expression in combination with appropriate statistical methods could act as potential biomarkers to screen for the abuse of anabolic agents.