new: "A strategy towards the generation of testable adverse outcome pathways for nanomaterials"

Awesome logo of the ALTEX -
Alternatives to Animal Experimentation
journal.

Our BiGCaT research group studies the systems underlying biology. Here, I focus my research on the chemistry bits, and contribute with my knowledge around cheminformatics, data analysis, data representation, and software development. Marvin Martens is bridging molecular pathways (think WikiPathways, doi:10.1093/nar/gkaa1024) with Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs), see this paper and this preprint. He is dissemination his OpenRiskNet and EU-ToxRisk research to the nano projects, such as RiskGONE.

Now, our RiskGONE partners in Leuven, Dr Sivakumar Murugadoss and Prof. Peter Hoet led a project to work out how to make AOPs testable: "A strategy towards the generation of testable adverse outcome pathways for nanomaterials" (doi:10.14573/altex.2102191) I am very excited that our group has been able to contribute to this work.

Murugadoss et al. identified in this paper the molecular initiating events (MIEs) for engineered nanomaterials from literature and mined the AOP-Wiki for further information, particularly the downstream Key Events (KEs). After all, these is what we currently typically can measure with assays. Our experimental technologies continue to improve, but very often we still can only measure later, secondary effects of the exposure. Those are basically the KEs in the AOPs. This paper goes all the way to identifying how we can reasonably measure these KEs with assays, where measuring the MIE directly is still ideal.

Next step for the BiGCaT team, is to take this work, make the data FAIR enough that it can be intergrated with Marvin's other research.

BTW, did I already mention how awesome the ALTEX logo is?