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AOP Wiki Version 2.0
Citation:
Edwards, S. AOP Wiki Version 2.0. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Adverse Outcome Pathways can expand and enhance the use of ToxCast and other in vitro toxicity information by providing a mechanistic link to adverse outcomes of regulatory concern. The AOP-Wiki includes uniformly structured mechanistic descriptions generated and/or curated by the EPA as well as the broader scientific community. This makes the information accessible for risk assessors and reduces the time required to review the information and identify data gaps and uncertainties. We are also developing methods to accelerate the process of defining AOPs to increase our coverage of existing ToxCast assay targets and identify biological pathways that aren’t currently covered by existing screening approaches. Improvements with this version of the wiki facilitate the process of incorporating information from bioinformatics approaches to AOP development and adds formal ontological descriptions of the key events. Stressors in the AOP-Wiki now contain explicit reference to DTX chemical identifiers used by the Chemistry Dashboard as well. The latter efforts will allow for better integration of the wiki content with ToxCast and other EPA information via the Chemistry Dashboard and RapidTox tools.
Description:
Version 2.0 of the AOP-Wiki was released on December 4, 2016. This was a major upgrade and should provide a better user experience. It fixes a number of bugs with the previous version, provides a more streamlined user interface, and sets the stage for providing more programmatic access in 2017. The new design will facilitate reciprocal links between the AOP-Wiki and the Chemistry Dashboard and will allow the incorporation of AOP-Wiki information in the RapidTox reports. The new wiki release also incorporates biological ontologies for describing key events. Efforts are underway to tag the existing key events in collaboration with the AOP authors. Moving forward, authors will be encouraged and possibly required to tag their key events as they are added. Having key events described by structured ontologies will enable additional tools to support AOP development and use. For example, having precisely defined key events will facilitate quantitative AOP development by providing a common, computable representation of the biology underlying the key event. In addition, automated efforts to develop hypothetical computationally predicted AOPs (cpAOPs) can use the same biological ontologies, which will accelerate the conversion of the cpAOPs to expert-curated AOPs in the AOP-Wiki. Finally, having structured descriptions of the key events will facilitate use of AOP information for risk assessment by allowing the inclusion of AOP-Wiki information in automated reports such as the RapidTox tool.