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A more sustainable future begins with collaboration and data
Citation:
Williams, A. AND S. Kish. A more sustainable future begins with collaboration and data. IN: AOCS Inform, American Oil Chemists Society, Champaign, IL, (7):13-16, (2023).
Impact/Purpose:
The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention administers the Safer Choice program to help consumers, businesses, and purchasers find cleaning and other products that perform and contain ingredients that are safer for human health and the environment. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development offers a series of linked databases and online applications where users can access chemical information on thousands of chemicals including the structure and properties of chemicals previously studied by the agency, as well as methods available to analyze chemicals. ExxonMobil∗ has leveraged over three decades of in-house testing to develop a model to help their customers identify potential alternate chemicals for cleaning product formulations. With the use of EPA databases and industry assistance, many companies create new, safer product formulations and submit their product information to the EPA to obtain Safer Choicecertification to advertise that their products work well and contain only safer ingredients for people and the planet.
Description:
Analytical methods are scattered across the internet in the form of regulatory methods, laboratory procedures, standard operating procedures, scientific publications and instrument vendor technical notes. The chemical substances in the methods are represented in a heterogeneous manner including systematic chemical names and synonyms, Chemical Abstracts Service registry numbers (CAS RN) and drawn chemical structures, generally in PDF files. To this point no one organization has assembled, extracted and annotated analytical methods into a database that will be freely available to everyone to search and obtain their method(s) of interest. The US-EPA is using a combination of cheminformatics, text mining, and brute force manual extraction and annotation to build such a database. In addition, to make the database even more useful, especially to support mass spectrometry non-targeted analysis, they are harvesting public domain mass spectrometry data, adding data gathered within their own laboratories, curating the chemical structures, homogenizing the resulting data into a single format, and making it available via a web-based application affectionately named AMOS, the Analytical Methods and Open Spectral Database.
URLs/Downloads:
TECHNICAL NEWSLETTER ARTICLE.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 477.04 KB, about PDF)https://www.aocs.org/stay-informed/inform-magazine/featured-articles/a-more-sustainable-future-begins-with-collaboration-and-data-september-2023
