Citation:

Williams, A., L. Gaines, C. Grulke, C. Lowe, G. Sinclair, V. Samano, I. Thillainadarajah, B. Meyer, G. Patlewicz, AND A. Richard. Assembly and Curation of Lists of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) to Support Environmental Science Research. Frontiers in Environmental Science. Frontiers, Lausanne, Switzerland, 10:850019, (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2022.850019

Impact/Purpose:

The availability of curated PFAS datasets mapping together chemical structures (where available) and chemical identifiers (i.e., common names, systematic names, CAS registry numbers) is an essential underpinning for the management of PFAS related data. Physicochemical property, fate and transport data and in vitro and in vivo toxicity data are mapped to chemicals that form the basis of data reporting and predictive modeling. The PFAS lists reported in this publication are the foundational data made available to the scientific community via the publicly accessible CompTox Chemicals Dashboard.

Description:

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of man-made chemicals of global concern for many health and regulatory agencies due to their widespread use and persistence in the environment (in soil, air, and water), bioaccumulation, and toxicity. This concern has catalyzed a need to aggregate data to support research efforts that can, in turn, inform regulatory and statutory actions. An ongoing challenge regarding PFAS has been the shifting definition of what qualifies a substance to be a member of the PFAS class. There is no single definition for a PFAS, but various attempts have been made to utilize substructural definitions that either encompass broad working scopes or satisfy narrower regulatory guidelines. Depending on the size and specificity of PFAS substructural filters applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) DSSTox database, currently exceeding 900,000 unique substances, PFAS substructure-defined space can span hundreds to tens of thousands of compounds. This manuscript reports on the curation of PFAS chemicals and assembly of lists that have been made publicly available to the community via the EPA’s CompTox Chemicals Dashboard. Creation of these PFAS lists required the harvesting of data from EPA and online databases, peer-reviewed publications, and regulatory documents. These data have been extracted and manually curated, annotated with structures, and made available to the community in the form of lists defined by structure filters, as well as lists comprising non-structurable PFAS, such as polymers and complex mixtures. These lists, along with their associated linkages to predicted and measured data, are fueling PFAS research efforts within the EPA and are serving as a valuable resource to the international scientific community.

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