dbZach toxicogenomic information management system

Abstract

Quantitative risk assessment and the elucidation of mechanisms of toxicity require innovative computational analysis and infrastructure capable of integrating all levels of biological data organization. Enterprise data management solutions provide the capability to manage and integrate disparate data throughout the source-to-outcome continuum. These capabilities enable software engineers and developers to create and validate software solutions to facilitate the identification of more predictive biomarkers for exposures, molecular responses and toxicity, allowing evaluation of historical assessments and the comparison of data across technologies, species and chemical classes. The toxicogenomic information management system dbZach is a modular relational database with associated data insertion, retrieval and mining tools that manages traditional toxicology and complementary toxicogenomic data to facilitate comprehensive data integration, analysis and sharing. To achieve widescale toxicogenomic data reporting and sharing, a dialog with other toxicogenomic database groups and the toxicogenomics community has emerged to identify needs and requirements, as well as establish the structure of data reporting and exchange standards.