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Adding Standard Identifiers to ECOTOX (Chemicals, Species) and Linking to CompTox Chemicals Dashboard
Citation:
Olker, J. AND C. Lalone. Adding Standard Identifiers to ECOTOX (Chemicals, Species) and Linking to CompTox Chemicals Dashboard. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
The ECOTOXicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX, www.epa.gov/ecotox) is the world’s largest compilation of ecotoxicity data and has provided support for chemical assessments and research for over 30 years through systematic and transparent procedures to identify and curate ecological toxicity data. The objective of this work is to enhance the interoperability of ECOTOX with biological and chemical resources relevant for risk assessment, research, and model development, including the USEPA CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (CCD), the Adverse Outcome Pathway Wiki (AOP wiki), and Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS). Providing linkages between databases based on standard identifiers for species and chemicals will provide more effective methods to search and leverage existing data resources, including the in vivo effects data contained in ECOTOX, for evaluating taxonomic applicability and predicting chemical hazard.
Description:
Applications that use toxicity test results from ECOTOX (e.g., ecological risk assessment, SSDs, site-specific hazard evaluations) typically incorporate additional toxicity, chemical, and biological data from other sources. The addition of standardized identifiers to ECOTOX increase the interoperability with other Agency Tools and Databases and make data within ECOTOX more accessible from external resources. Recent enhancements to ECOTOX focusing on interoperability include incorporation of unique standard identifiers for chemicals and biological species. The Distributed Structure Searchable Toxicity Database Substance ID (DTXSID) was added to ECOTOX to increase interoperability with databases such as the US EPA CompTox Chemicals Dashboard that include physicochemical properties, exposure, uses, and so forth. In addition, linkages from ECOTOX to the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard were added to the UI through the DTXSID. The NCBI Taxonomy Identifier (TaxID) was added to ECOTOX in order to link to biological species resources, including allowing for greater interoperability with the resources on species including the USEPA Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) tool that uses protein sequence comparisons to make predictions of chemical susceptibility across species.