The Environmental Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology (ECTO): connecting toxicology and exposure to human health and beyond.

Journal: Journal of biomedical semantics
Published Date: Feb 24, 2023

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Evaluating the impact of environmental exposures on organism health is a key goal of modern biomedicine and is critically important in an age of greater pollution and chemicals in our environment. Environmental health utilizes many different research methods and generates a variety of data types. However, to date, no comprehensive database represents the full spectrum of environmental health data. Due to a lack of interoperability between databases, tools for integrating these resources are needed. In this manuscript we present the Environmental Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology (ECTO), a species-agnostic ontology focused on exposure events that occur as a result of natural and experimental processes, such as diet, work, or research activities. ECTO is intended for use in harmonizing environmental health data resources to support cross-study integration and inference for mechanism discovery.

Authors

  • Lauren E Chan
    Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA. chanl@oregonstate.edu.
  • Anne E Thessen
    Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, United States of America.
  • William D Duncan
    Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY, USA.
  • Nicolas Matentzoglu
    School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK. nicolas.matentzoglu@manchester.ac.uk.
  • Charles Schmitt
    National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Durham, North Carolina, United States.
  • Cynthia J Grondin
    Department of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America.
  • Nicole Vasilevsky
    Library, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA.
  • Julie A McMurry
    Monarch Initiative, monarchinitiative.org.
  • Peter N Robinson
    The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine Farmington CT 06032 USA.
  • Christopher J Mungall
    Genomics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
  • Melissa A Haendel
    Library, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA.

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