Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Department of Bioinformatics, the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, Salisbury Cove, ME 04672, USA

Email

apd@mdibl.org; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Database

Date

Received October 04, 2011; Accepted October 05, 2011; Published October 14, 2011

The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a free resource that describes chemical-gene-disease networks to help understand the effects of environmental exposures on human health. The database contains more than 13,500 chemical-disease and 14,200 gene-disease interactions. In CTD, chemicals and genes are associated with a disease via two types of relationships: as a biomarker or molecular mechanism for the disease (M-type) or as a real or putative therapy for the disease (T-type). We leveraged these curated datasets to compute similarity indices that can be used to produce lists of comparable diseases (DiseaseComps) based upon shared toxicogenomic profiles. This new metric now classifies diseases with common molecular characteristics, instead of the traditional approach of using histology or tissue of origin to define the disorder. In the dawning era of personalized medicine, this feature provides a new way to view and describe diseases and will help develop testable hypotheses about chemical-gene-disease networks.

Availability

CTD is freely available at http://ctd.mdibl.org/

Keywords

disease, gene, chemical, database, curation

Citation

Davis et al. Bioinformation 7(4): 154-156 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.