Toxicology has been an active research field for many decades, with academic, industrial and government involvement. Modern omics and computational approaches are changing the field, from merely disease-specific observational models into target-specific predictive models.
Traditionally, toxicology has strong links with other fields such as biology, chemistry, pharmacology and medicine. With the rise of synthetic and new engineered materials, alongside ongoing prioritisation needs in chemical risk assessment for existing chemicals, early predictive evaluations are becoming of utmost importance to both scientific and regulatory purposes.
The current main goal of the Toxicology Community is to support the integration of standards, tools and resources to support toxicology research projects and risk governance at the national and international level.
Goals of the Community
The ELIXIR Toxicology Community was created in 2020. Its goals are:
Align open solutions from toxicology research with ELIXIR services and resources
Both toxicology projects and ELIXIR Platforms and Communities have developed models, ontologies, educational material and standards.
The Toxicology Community will align efforts and maximise the benefit. For example, various toxicology projects have been using Bioschemas annotation in online training material.
Connect toxicology research with ELIXIR Platforms and Communities
More synergy can be found by more closely connecting the core ELIXIR resources and communities with the inclusive communities that have evolved over the past few years like OpenTox, eNanoMapper, diXa, OpenRiskNet, NORMAN and older communities like the Federation of European Toxicologists & European Societies of Toxicology (EUROTOX), the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) and European Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society (EEMGS, formerly known as EEMS).
Develop open community standards
Toxicology projects like OpenTox, diXa, eNanoMapper, and others have already developed various open, domain-specific standards. Some in collaboration with ELIXIR projects like bio.tools, FAIRsharing, etc.
This goal aims to further develop open community standards to support common interest, including ontologies, APIs, data formats, deposition databases, and publication recommendations.
Leadership
(ELIXIR Netherlands)
(ELIXIR Netherlands)
(ELIXIR France)
katharina.heil@elixir-europe.org
(Communities Liaison, ELIXIR Hub)
Additional Community support
- Marvin Martens (ELIXIR Netherlands)
Find out more
- Contact toxicology-coleads@elixir-europe.org if you'd like to know more about the community's work.
- Publications:
- Martens M, Stierum R, Schymanski EL et al. ELIXIR and Toxicology: a community in development [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research 2023, 10(ELIXIR):1129 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.74502.2)
- Other outputs:
- FAIRsharing Toxicology Collection: https://fairsharing.org/3496
- BioSchemas collaboration leading to ChemicalSubstance uses