I'm glad the first part of this post was so broadly accepted. Many people liked this discussion in different forums and, even though I'm not ego fed, it is always good to understand that our work touches people's interests somehow. Thank you all who felt my work was practical, helpful and interesting.
With no further ado let's jump to the second part of this triangle of tools available nowadays for our biological, biochemical and computational work. The tools I am to bring to you today relate to predictive toxicology and can be found in a more descriptive and prolonged review accessing
HERE.
So, today we'll be learning about Software Tools for Toxicity Prediction, based on the work by Mojca Fuart Gatnik and Andrew Worth published in the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Scientific and Technical Reports, in 2010. JRC is commited to provide scientific support to help develop and implement European policies concerning the health and safety of the European consumers. In the published review of the aforementioned tools they explore both free and commercial software, however, for the reasons we might all understand, I'll be solely touching the surface of the freeware.
Estimation Programme Interface (EPI) Suite
- Windows(R) based platform
- developed by the Environmental protection Agency;
- provides a vast range of screening-levels physical and chemical properties and environmental fate estimation programs. Relates to the foundations of the exposure assessment;
- requires that users have suitable data from literature;
- composed of more than 15 different applications;
- offers individual estimation programs and underlying predictive methods and equations;
- complete and professional-driven.
OncoLogic(R)
- Windows(R) based platform;
- developed by the Environmental protection Agency;
- provides a computer system to evaluate the carcinogenic potential of chemicals;
- requires user to be familiar with organic chemistry and routes of exposure of toxicants;
- built upon "compilation" of many literature toxicology encyclopaedias;
- EPA offers hands-on training sessions, the software provides guidance to the public, to industries and to regulatory agencies.
Toxtree
- developed by JRC Computational Toxicology and Modelling;
- estimates toxic hazard by applying a decision-tree approach
- full-featured application, flexible, user-friendly, open source;
- can be found online;
- main language is JAVA;
- allows new decision trees with arbitrary rules to be built in;
- plugins are being developed;
Toxmatch
- main language JAVA;
- standalone application;
- for any operational system
- provides means to compare a chemical or set of chemicals to a toxicity data set;
- includes data sets for four toxicity endpoints;
OK guys, hope it was all good information that can be useful for you whether you use it domestically or professionally. See you soon for the third and last part of triple post. Stay tuned!
