Predictive toxicology of chemicals and database mining

The toxic chemicals from the database Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS) were analyzed by structural similarity comparison, which shows that the structure patterns or characteristics of toxic chemicals exist in a sufficiently large database. Then, a two-step strategy was proposed to explore noncongeneric toxic chemicals in the database: the screening of structure patterns by similarity comparison and the derivation of detailed relationship between structure and activity by using comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA) of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) technologies. From the performance of the procedure, such a stepwise scheme is demonstrated to be feasible and effective to mine a database of toxic chemicals. It can be anticipated that database mining of toxic chemicals will be a new area for predictive toxicology of chemicals.