Since 2001, we have been developing and expanding the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD). CTD is a publicly available database that aims to inform understanding about the effects of environmental exposures on human health. To do this, a team of scientists and software developers curate and integrate diverse data describing relationships between chemicals, genes/proteins, phenotypes, and diseases as well as complex exposure information. Analytical tools are helping scientists in academia, regulatory agencies, and commercial R&D to understand mechanisms of action and biological outcomes of thousands of environmental chemicals and pharmaceutical agents. Meet the CTD team and learn more about this resource through our publications.
CTD has been generously and continuously funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) since 2001. The most recent U24 mechanism funding CTD is supported by the NIEHS and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
We are also leveraging the zebrafish to validate hypotheses about environmental exposures we suspect are affecting human development and disease. Why the zebrafish? They are small, inexpensive vertebrates that develop rapidly and transparently, have most of the same genes and organs as humans, and are experimentally tractable. That means we can mimic genetic mutations in human diseases and explore whether those mutations make individuals more susceptible to environmental exposures. We are currently collaborating with the Planchart laboratory on projects involving a fish model of the neurodegenerative disease, ALS, to understand the contribution of environmental exposures on the underlying etiology of this disease.