Systems Toxicology II : A Special Issue ; Editorial

Abstract

In this issue, Chemical Research in Toxicology ventures for the second time to gather a collection of articles around the topic of Systems Toxicology. The field has emerged as a result of the dramatic shift of modern Toxicology to identify and understand biological perturbations from a molecular perspective, with the goal of establishing a predictive basis for promoting chemical safety. The first Systems Toxicology special issue published in 2014 included diverse examples of current research and ideas driving the science forward. It presented new high-content bioanalysis strategies and cellbased test systems, data curation, analysis, and integration strategies to enable the solution of mechanistic network models to describe toxicity pathways. As the field has moved forward, the contributions to the Systems Toxicology II issue contained herein strive to take a further step toward better integrating multidisciplinary facets: gathering large sets of experimental data by high-dimensionality bioanalytical technologies, creating and solving mathematical models to describe these large data sets, and assessing the quality of the model by comparing predictions with experimental data.