The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public resource that promotes understanding about the effects of environmental chemicals on human health. CTD biocurators manually curate a triad of chemical-gene, chemical-disease and gene-disease relationships from the scientific literature. The CTD curation paradigm uses controlled vocabularies for chemicals, genes and diseases. To curate disease information, CTD first had to identify a source of controlled terms. Two resources seemed to be good candidates: the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) and the 'Diseases' branch of the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headers (MeSH). To maximize the advantages of both, CTD biocurators undertook a novel initiative to map the flat list of OMIM disease terms into the hierarchical nature of the MeSH vocabulary. The result is CTD's 'merged disease vocabulary' (MEDIC), a unique resource that integrates OMIM terms, synonyms and identifiers with MeSH terms, synonyms, definitions, identifiers and hierarchical relationships. MEDIC is both a deep and broad vocabulary, composed of 9700 unique diseases described by more than 67 000 terms (including synonyms). It is freely available to download in various formats from CTD. While neither a true ontology nor a perfect solution, this vocabulary has nonetheless proved to be extremely successful and practical for our biocurators in generating over 2.5 million disease-associated toxicogenomic relationships in CTD. Other external databases have also begun to adopt MEDIC for their disease vocabulary. Here, we describe the construction, implementation, maintenance and use of MEDIC to raise awareness of this resource and to offer it as a putative scaffold in the formal construction of an official disease ontology. DATABASE URL: http://ctd.mdibl.org/voc.go?type=disease.
Pubmed ID: 22434833 RIS Download
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A public database that enhances understanding of the effects of environmental chemicals on human health. Integrated GO data and a GO browser add functionality to CTD by allowing users to understand biological functions, processes and cellular locations that are the targets of chemical exposures. CTD includes curated data describing cross-species chemical–gene/protein interactions, chemical–disease and gene–disease associations to illuminate molecular mechanisms underlying variable susceptibility and environmentally influenced diseases. These data will also provide insights into complex chemical–gene and protein interaction networks.
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