Exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) during development may cause reproductive disorders in women. Although female reproductive endpoints are assessed in rodent toxicity studies, a concern is that typical endpoints are not sensitive enough to detect chemicals of concern to human health. If so, measured endpoints must be improved or new biomarkers of effects included.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExposure to perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) has been associated with congenital heart disease (CHD) and decreased birth weight. PFOS exposure can disrupt signaling pathways relevant for cardiac development in stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte assays, such as the PluriBeat assay, where spheroids of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) differentiate into contracting cardiomyocytes. Notably, cell line origin can also affect how the assay responds to chemical exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) is a persistent anthropogenic chemical that can affect the thyroid hormone system in humans and animals. In adults, thyroid hormones (THs) are regulated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, but also by organs such as the liver and potentially the gut microbiota. PFOS and other xenobiotics can therefore disrupt the TH system at various locations and through different mechanisms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA short anogenital distance (AGD) in males is a marker for incomplete masculinization and a predictor of adverse effects on male reproductive health. For this reason, AGD is used to assess the endocrine disrupting potential of chemicals for risk assessment purposes. The molecular mechanisms underpinning this chemically induced shortening of the AGD, however, remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation: Recent advances in transcriptomics have enabled unprecedented insight into gene expression analysis at a single-cell resolution. While it is anticipated that the number of publications based on such technologies will increase in the next decade, there is currently no public resource to centralize and enable scientists to explore single-cell datasets published in the field of reproductive biology.
Results: Here, we present a major update of the ReproGenomics Viewer, a cross-species and cross-technology web-based resource of manually-curated sequencing datasets related to reproduction.
Motivation: At the same time that toxicologists express increasing concern about reproducibility in this field, the development of dedicated databases has already smoothed the path toward improving the storage and exchange of raw toxicogenomic data. Nevertheless, none provides access to analyzed and interpreted data as originally reported in scientific publications. Given the increasing demand for access to this information, we developed TOXsIgN, a repository for TOXicogenomic sIgNatures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmong the 20 000 human gene products predicted from genome annotation, about 3000 still lack validation at protein level. We developed PepPSy, a user-friendly gene expression-based prioritization system, to help investigators to determine in which human tissues they should look for an unseen protein. PepPSy can also be used by biocurators to revisit the annotation of specific categories of proteins based on the 'omics' data housed by the system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report the development of the ReproGenomics Viewer (RGV), a multi- and cross-species working environment for the visualization, mining and comparison of published omics data sets for the reproductive science community. The system currently embeds 15 published data sets related to gametogenesis from nine model organisms. Data sets have been curated and conveniently organized into broad categories including biological topics, technologies, species and publications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF