Monomorphic

If you work in toxicology or drug discovery, you might be familiar with the database Open TG-GATEs, a large transcriptomics database that catalogues gene expression response to well-known drugs and toxins. This database was developed by Japan’s Toxicogenomics Project during many years, as a private-public sector partnership, and remains a very valuable resource. As with many large datasets, despite the open-ness, accessing and working with this data can require considerable work. Data must always be placed in a context, and these contexts must be continually renewed. One user-friendly interface to simplify access to this data is Toxygates, which I begun developing as a postdoc at NIBIOHN in the Mizuguchi Lab in 2012 (and am still the lead developer of). As a web application, Toxygates lets you look at data of interest in context, together with annotations such as gene ontology terms and metabolic pathways, as well as visualisation tools.

We are now releasing a new major version of Toxygates, which, among many other new features, allows you to perform and visualise gene set clustering analyses directly in the web browser. Gene sets can also be easily characterised through an enrichment function, which is supported by the TargetMine data warehouse. Last but not least, users can now upload their own data and cluster and analyse it in context, together with the Open TG-GATEs data.

Our new paper in Scientific Reports documents the new version of Toxygates and illustrates the use of the new functions through a case study performed on the hepatotoxic drug WY-14643. If you are curious, give it a try.

When I begun the development as a quick prototype, I had no idea that the project would still be evolving many years later. Toxygates represents considerable work and many learning experiences for me as a researcher and software engineer, and I’m very grateful to everybody who has collaborated with us, supported the project, and made our journey possible.