A toxicogenomic data space for system-level understanding and prediction of EDC-induced toxicity

Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) are a persistent threat to humans and wildlife due to their ability to interfere with endocrine signaling pathways. Inspired by previous work to improve chemical hazard identification through the use of toxicogenomics data, we developed a genomic-oriented data space for profiling the molecular activity of EDCs in an in silico manner, and for creating predictive models that identify and prioritize EDCs. Predictive models of EDCs, derived from gene expression data from rats (in vivo and in vitro primary hepatocytes) and humans (in vitro primary hepatocytes and HepG2), achieve testing accuracy greater than 90%. Negative test sets indicate that known safer chemicals are not predicted as EDCs. The rat in vivo-based classifiers achieve accuracy greater than 75% when tested for in vitro to in vivo extrapolation. This study reveals key metabolic pathways and genes affected by EDCs together with a set of predictive models that utilize these pathways to prioritize EDCs in dose/time dependent manner and to predict EDC evoked metabolic diseases.

Automated summary

The study developed predictive models based on gene expression data to efficiently identify and prioritize EDCs, revealing key metabolic pathways and genes affected by EDCs.