Unbiased approach for the identification of molecular mechanisms sensitive to chemical exposures.

Targeted methods that dominated toxicological research until recently did not allow for screening of all molecular changes involved in toxic response. Therefore, it is difficult to infer if all major mechanisms of toxicity have already been discovered, or if some of them are still overlooked. We used data on 591,084 unique chemical-gene interactions to identify genes and molecular pathways most sensitive to chemical exposures.

Data on chemical-gene interactions and biological categories enriched with genes sensitive to chemical exposures.

A dataset of chemical-gene interactions was created by extracting data from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) with the following filtering criteria: data was extracted only from experiments that used human, rat, or mouse cells/tissues and used high-throughput approaches for gene expression analysis. Genes not present in genomes of all three species were filtered out. The resulting dataset included 591,084 chemical-gene interaction.