[The development of computational toxicology and application in risk assessment of chemicals]

Abstract

The number of new chemicals increases tremendously annually, while traditional time-and cost-consuming toxicity tests based on animals with the uncertainty of extrapolation could not meet the demand of hazard identification and risk assessment. Thus,the evolution of methodology for toxicity tests is desired to fill up the huge data gap. With the rapid development of life science and technology,the insights into the nature of life and pathology of diseases have changed and systematic toxicology has emerged. Equipping with the advantages of multi-disciplinary study,systematic toxicology expands the research fields of toxicology and accelerates the speed of illustrating molecular mechanism of environmental xenobiotics, biomarkers screening and validation, and the development of new methods for risk assessment. Toxicogenomics and computational toxicology analysis are the major technology of systematic toxicology. Computational toxicology integrates data from toxicogenomics to construct multi-levels and multi-dimensional models for quantitative exposure risk assessment. This research summarized the research progress of computational toxicology from the aspects of research strategies, common databases, analytical tools, research methods and application, so as to provide references for the risk assessment of chemical substances.

Keywords: Hazardous substances; Risk assessment; Toxicology.