Training

The Data Infrastructure for Chemical Safety (diXa) project works with past and current EU FP7 projects, developing Alternatives to Animal testing, to safeguard data for the future. diXa aims to develop a sustainable data infrastructure to capture all data produced by toxicogenomics projects in a standardized, harmonized and sustainable manner. The lack of such an infrastructure currently prevents innovative breakthroughs from meta-analyses of joint databases and systems modeling. The diXa Data Warehouse will link to other globally available chemical/toxicological databases and data bases on molecular data of human disease to facilitate interdisciplinary research.

The 3 day diXa course will give participants an overview of the chemical and biological resources that are available for researchers in the field of Toxicology and Toxicogenomics. The course is aimed at researchers and scientists from academia as well as Industry with an interest in toxicology, toxicogenomics and life sciences.

The first part introduces EBI resources ChEMBL, Ensembl, PDBe and ArrayExpress with use cases specifically chosen to be relevant to the toxicology and toxicogenomics community e.g. cross-species homology, comparisons, structure similarity, function prediction.

The second part of the course provides an introduction to the diXa project, demonstration of the capabilities of the diXa data warehouse, and a workflow based demonstration of Quality control and data cross checking; starting from downloading data to performing a quality assessment of the raw data, methods to condense data, annotating the experiments, how to normalize and/or transform the data, through to performing adequate statistical tests and interpreting results using GO annotations and/or pathway annotations using ConsensuPathDb. Additionally the course will feature presentations from the research groups of the diXa project.