Unbiased approach for the identification of molecular mechanisms sensitive to chemical exposures

Abstract

Targeted methods that dominated toxicological research until recently did not allow for screening of all molecular changes involved in toxic response. Therefore, it is difficult to infer if all major mechanisms of toxicity have already been discovered, or if some of them are still overlooked. We used data on 591,084 unique chemical-gene interactions to identify genes and molecular pathways most sensitive to chemical exposures. The list of identified pathways did not change significantly when analyses were done on different subsets of data with non-overlapping lists of chemical compounds indicative that our dataset is saturated enough to provide unbiased results. One of the most important findings of this study is that almost every known molecular mechanism may be affected by chemical exposures. Predictably, xenobiotic metabolism pathways, and mechanisms of cellular response to stress and damage were among the most sensitive. Additionally, we identified highly sensitive molecular pathways, which are not widely recognized as major targets of toxicants, including lipid metabolism pathways, longevity regulation cascade, and cytokine-mediated signaling. These mechanisms are relevant to significant public health problems, such as aging, cancer, metabolic and autoimmune disease. Thus, public health field will benefit from future focus of toxicological research on identified sensitive mechanisms.