The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public website and research tool that curates scientific data describing relationships between chemicals, genes, and human diseases.

The database is maintained by the Department of Bioinformatics at The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Maine.

Goals and objectives

One of the primary goals of CTD is to advance the understanding of the effects of environmental chemicals on human health.

The etiology of many chronic diseases involves interactions between environmental factors and genes that modulate important physiological processes. Chemicals are an important component of the environment. Conditions such as asthma, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, immunodeficiency, and Parkinson's disease are known to be influenced by the environment; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying these correlations are not well understood. CTD may help resolve these mechanisms.

Core data

CTD is a unique resource where biocurators read the scientific literature and manually curate three types of core data:

• Chemical-gene interactions
• Chemical-disease associations
• Gene-disease associations

Data integration

By integrating the above three data sets, CTD automatically constructs putative chemical-gene-disease networks to illuminate molecular mechanisms underlying environmentally-influenced diseases.

Users can search CTD to explore scientific data for chemicals, genes, diseases, or interactions between any of these three concepts. Currently, CTD integrates toxicogenomic data for vertebrates and invertebrates, including 59,000 chemicals, 1.2 million gene and protein sequences (and their associated Gene Ontology and KEGG pathway annotations), 83,000 taxonomic terms, and 6,000 human diseases to produce a unique resource for the cross-species analysis of chemical, gene, and disease interactions.

CTD integrates data from or hyperlinks to these databases:

• ChemIDplus
• GenBank
• DrugBank
• Environment, Drugs and Gene Expression
• GOAnnotations@EBI
• Gene Ontology Consortium
• KEGG
• NCBI Entrez-Gene
• NCBI PubMed
• NCBI Taxonomy
• NLM Medical Subject Headings
• OMIM
• UniProt

References

External links

• Comparative Toxicogenomics Database
• The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory