The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public website and research tool launched in November 2004 that curates scientific data describing relationships between chemicals/drugs, genes/proteins, diseases, taxa, phenotypes, GO annotations, pathways, and interaction modules. The database is maintained by the Department of Biological Sciences at

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State, North Carolina State, NC State University, or NCSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Founded in 1887 and p ...

Background

The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public website and research tool that curates scientific data describing relationships between chemicals, genes/proteins, diseases, taxa, phenotypes, GO annotations, pathways, and interaction modules, launched on November 12, 2004. The database is maintained by the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University.

Goals and objectives

One of the primary goals of CTD is to advance the understanding of the effects of environmental chemicals on human health on the genetic level, a field called toxicogenomics. The etiology of many chronic diseases involves interactions between environmental factors and genes that modulate important physiological processes. Chemicals are an important component of the environment. Conditions such as

asthma Asthma is a common long-term inflammatory disease of the airways of the lungs. It is characterized by variable and recurring symptoms, reversible airflow obstruction, and easily triggered bronchospasms. Symptoms include episodes of wh ...

, cancer,

diabetes Diabetes mellitus, commonly known as diabetes, is a group of common endocrine diseases characterized by sustained high blood sugar levels. Diabetes is due to either the pancreas not producing enough of the hormone insulin, or the cells of th ...

hypertension Hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is a Chronic condition, long-term Disease, medical condition in which the blood pressure in the artery, arteries is persistently elevated. High blood pressure usually does not cause symptoms i ...

immunodeficiency Immunodeficiency, also known as immunocompromise, is a state in which the immune system's ability to fight infectious diseases and cancer is compromised or entirely absent. Most cases are acquired ("secondary") due to extrinsic factors that aff ...

, and

Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a neurodegenerative disease primarily of the central nervous system, affecting both motor system, motor and non-motor systems. Symptoms typically develop gradually and non-motor issues become ...

are known to be influenced by the environment; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying these correlations are not well understood. CTD may help resolve these mechanisms. The most up-to-date extensive list of peer-reviewed scientific articles about CTD is available at their publications page

Core data

CTD is a unique resource where biocurators read the scientific literature and manually curate four types of core data: * Chemical-gene interactions * Chemical-disease associations * Gene-disease associations * Chemical-phenotype associations

Data integration

By integrating the above four data sets, CTD automatically constructs putative chemical-gene-phenotype-disease networks to illuminate molecular mechanisms underlying environmentally-influenced diseases. These inferred relationships are statistically scored and ranked and can be used by scientists and computational biologists to generate and verify testable hypotheses about toxicogenomic mechanisms and how they relate to human health. Users can search CTD to explore scientific data for chemicals, genes, diseases, or interactions between any of these three concepts. Currently, CTD integrates toxicogenomic data for vertebrates and invertebrates. CTD integrates data from or hyperlinks to these databases: *ChemIDplus, a dictionary of more than 400,000 chemicals housed in the US National Library of Medicine * DrugBank *Data Infrastructure for Chemical Safety project (diXa) Data Warehouse by the European Bioinformatics Institute which as of November 2015 contained 469 compounds, 188 disease datasets in three sub-categories liver, kidney and cardiovascular disease. * Gene Ontology Consortium * KEGG * NCBI Entrez-Gene * NCBI PubMed *NCBI TaxonomyNCBI Taxonomy
/ref> * NLM Medical Subject Headings * OMIM * Reactome

References

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External links

Comparative Toxicogenomics Database

MDI Biologicjfxal Laboratory
Biochemistry databases Genetics databases Ontology (information science) Toxicology Molecular genetics Environmental science Comparisons