Chemical databases for environmental health and clinical research

Abstract

The increasing number of publicly available biological databases reflects the evolving need for managing and evaluating abundant and complex data in biological, clinical and computational research. Currently there are over 1000 biologically relevant databases in the public domain with varied content and diverse approaches to capturing and presenting data. This review summarizes the comparatively small niche of sophisticated databases and other resources that aim to enhance understanding of chemicals and their biological actions. The databases reviewed include 1 that emphasizes environmental chemicals and 9 that emphasize drugs and small molecules. These databases and their associated resources are incrementally strengthening the expanding field of toxicogenomics-based research by providing centralized sources of manually and computationally curated datasets and highly sophisticated tools for the meta-analysis of continually increasing environmental chemical, drug and small-molecule datasets.

Figure 1. Curated data relationships in the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD)

CTD manually curates chemical-gene/protein interactions and chemical- and gene-disease relationships from the peer-reviewed published literature. By integrating these relationships and interactions, CTD facilitates development of hypotheses about the etiologies of environmentally influenced diseases. Other databases described in this review address various aspects of these essential relationships between drugs and small molecules, genes/proteins and diseases/phenotypes.