The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary on the web. Since its beginnings, CTD has been devoted to centralizing and harmonizing information about genes responding to environmental toxic agents across diverse species. The database has now evolved into a premier toxicology resource, allowing scientists to discover information and develop testable hypotheses about the biological consequences of chemical exposure (both environmental and drug). Today, CTD includes over 24 million toxicogenomic connections relating chemicals/drugs, genes/proteins, diseases, taxa, phenotypes, Gene Ontology annotations, and pathways.
This celebratory milestone was recently published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, which summarized the history and evolution of CTD, including descriptions of curation processes, new content, and enhanced visualization and analysis tools. The article also detailed a new “Pathway View” tool that leverages gene interaction data from BioGRID to allow users to build unique toxicogenomic interaction modules connecting chemical exposure to disease events.
As it was ten years ago, CTD today is still managed by a small team of biologists and software engineers who work with both the toxicology and biocuration communities to advance understanding of chemical-gene-disease data and how best to extract and code this information from the published literature. All CTD data are freely available to the public. As well, CTD content has been disseminated further into the scientific community via more than 55 other databases that routinely incorporate CTD’s annotations. If interested in establishing links to CTD data, please notify us and follow these instructions.
