Comparative Toxicogenomics Database
Introduction
The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public website and research tool (CTD home page) that curates scientific data describing relationships between chemicals, genes, and human diseases. The database is maintained by The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Maine.
A primary goal 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 type of environmental factors. The environment is implicated in many common conditions such as asthma, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, immune deficiency disorders, and Parkinson disease; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying these correlations are not well understood.
CTD is a unique resource where professional biocurators read the scientific literature and manually curate three types of data:
- chemical-gene interactions
- chemical-disease associations
- gene-disease associations
By integrating these three data sets, CTD automatically constructs putative triads of chemical-gene-disease networks to illuminate molecular mechanisms underlying environmentally-influenced diseases.
Links
- Comparative Toxicogenomics Database: http://ctd.mdibl.org/
- The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory: http://www.mdibl.org/