CTDquerier: A Bioconductor R package for Comparative Toxicogenomics DatabaseTM data extraction, visualization and enrichment of environmental and toxicological studies

Abstract

Biomedical studies currently include a large volume of genomic and environmental factors for studying the etiology of human diseases. R/Bioconductor projects provide several tools for performing enrichment analysis at gene-pathway level, allowing researchers to develop novel hypotheses. However, there is a need to perform similar analyses at the chemicals-genes or chemicals-diseases levels, to provide complementary knowledge of the causal path between chemicals and diseases. While the Comparative Toxicogenomics DatabaseTM (CTD) provides information about these relationships, there is no software for integrating it into R/Bioconductor analysis pipelines. CTDquerier helps users to easily download CTD data and integrate it in the R/Bioconductor framework. The package also contains functions for visualizing CTD data and performing enrichment analyses. We illustrate how to use the package with a real data analysis of asthma-related genes. CTDquerier is a flexible and easy-to-use Bioconductor package that provides novel hypothesis about the relationships between chemicals and diseases. Availability and implementation: CTDquerier R package is available through Bioconductor and its development version at https://github.com/isglobal-brge/CTDquerier. Contact: juanr.gonzalez@isglobal.org. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.