GeneComps and ChemComps: a new CTD metric to identify genes and chemicals with shared toxicogenomic profiles

摘要

The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database is a public resource that promotes understanding about the effects of environmental chemicals onhuman health. Currently, CTD describes over 184,000 molecular interactions for more than 5,100 chemicals and 16,300 genes/proteins. Wehave leveraged this dataset of chemical-gene relationships to compute similarity indices following the statistical method of the Jaccard index.These scores are used to produce lists of comparable genes (“GeneComps”) or chemicals (“ChemComps”) based on shared toxicogenomicprofiles. GeneComps and ChemComps are now provided for every curated gene and chemical in CTD. ChemComps are particularly significantbecause they provide a way to group chemicals based upon their biological effects, instead of their physical or structural properties. These metricsprovide a novel way to view and classify genes and chemicals and will help advance testable hypotheses about environmental chemical-genediseasenetworks.