Utilizing literature-based rodent toxicology data to derive potency estimates for quantitative risk assessment.

Evaluating the potential occupational health risk of engineered nanomaterials is an ongoing need. The objective of this meta-analysis, which consisted of 36 studies containing 86 materials, was to assess the availability of published rodent pulmonary toxicity data for a variety of nanoscale and microscale materials and to derive potency estimates via benchmark dose modeling. Additionally, the potency estimates based on particle mass lung dose associated with acute pulmonary inflammation were used to group materials based on toxicity.

Cluster-based network proximities for arbitrary nodal subsets.

The concept of a cluster or community in a network context has been of considerable interest in a variety of settings in recent years. In this paper, employing random walks and geodesic distance, we introduce a unified measure of cluster-based proximity between nodes, relative to a given subset of interest. The inherent simplicity and informativeness of the approach could make it of value to researchers in a variety of scientific fields.