Can Toxicity for Different Species be Correlated?

Abstract

Experimental evaluation of the toxicity of a compound is an expensive practice, and it requires sacrifice of a large number of animals. As a consequence, in silico techniques for predictive toxicology are taking the central stage of attention of the scientific community. Interspecies quantitative structure-toxicity relationship (i-QSTR) modeling provides a tool for estimation of contaminant's sensitivity with known levels of uncertainty for a diverse pool of species. It is capable of extrapolating data for one toxicity endpoint to another toxicity endpoint when the data for the second species are unavailable. The emerging i-QSTR approach can overcome the cost of multiple toxicity tests, improve the understanding of the mechanism of toxic action (MOA) of chemicals for different organisms and endpoints and is very useful in order to fill the data gaps where toxicity value for a particular compound is absent for a specific endpoint.