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Richard Paules

Publications and source records attributed to Richard Paules.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Use of a mixed tissue RNA design for performance assessments on multiple microarray formats.

The comparability and reliability of data generated using microarray technology would be enhanced by use of a common set of standards that allow accuracy, reproducibility and dynamic range assessments on multiple formats. We designed and tested a complex biological reagent for performance measurements on three commercial oligonucleotide array formats that differ in probe design and signal measurement methodology. The reagent is a set of two mixtures with different proportions of RNA for each of four rat tissues (brain, liver, kidney and testes). The design provides four known ratio measurements of >200 reference probes, which were chosen for their tissue-selectivity, dynamic range coverage and alignment to the same exemplar transcript sequence across all three platforms. The data generated from testing three biological replicates of the reagent at eight laboratories on three array formats provides a benchmark set for both laboratory and data processing performance assessments. Close agreement with target ratios adjusted for sample complexity was achieved on all platforms and low variance was observed among platforms, replicates and sites. The mixed tissue design produces a reagent with known gene expression changes within a complex sample and can serve as a paradigm for performance standards for microarrays that target other species.

Animals↗

Chemical effects in biological systems--data dictionary (CEBS-DD): a compendium of terms for the capture and integration of biological study design description, conventional phenotypes, and 'omics data.

A critical component in the design of the Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) Knowledgebase is a strategy to capture toxicogenomics study protocols and the toxicity endpoint data (clinical pathology and histopathology). A Study is generally an experiment carried out during a period of time for the purpose of obtaining data, and the Study Design Description captures the methods, timing, and organization of the Study. The CEBS Data Dictionary (CEBS-DD) has been designed to define and organize terms in an attempt to standardize nomenclature needed to describe a toxicogenomics Study in a structured yet intuitive format and provide a flexible means to describe a Study as conceptualized by the investigator. The CEBS-DD will organize and annotate information from a variety of sources, thereby facilitating the capture and display of toxicogenomics data in biological context in CEBS, i.e., associating molecular events detected in highly-parallel data with the toxicology/pathology phenotype as observed in the individual Study Subjects and linked to the experimental treatments. The CEBS-DD has been developed with a focus on acute toxicity studies, but with a design that will permit it to be extended to other areas of toxicology and biology with the addition of domain-specific terms. To illustrate the utility of the CEBS-DD, we present an example of integrating data from two proteomics and transcriptomics studies of the response to acute acetaminophen toxicity (A. N. Heinloth et al., 2004, Toxicol. Sci. 80, 193-202).

Acetaminophen↗

An integrated stress response regulates amino acid metabolism and resistance to oxidative stress.

Eukaryotic cells respond to unfolded proteins in their endoplasmic reticulum (ER stress), amino acid starvation, or oxidants by phosphorylating the alpha subunit of translation initiation factor 2 (eIF2alpha). This adaptation inhibits general protein synthesis while promoting translation and expression of the transcription factor ATF4. Atf4(-/-) cells are impaired in expressing genes involved in amino acid import, glutathione biosynthesis, and resistance to oxidative stress. Perk(-/-) cells, lacking an upstream ER stress-activated eIF2alpha kinase that activates Atf4, accumulate endogenous peroxides during ER stress, whereas interference with the ER oxidase ERO1 abrogates such accumulation. A signaling pathway initiated by eIF2alpha phosphorylation protects cells against metabolic consequences of ER oxidation by promoting the linked processes of amino acid sufficiency and resistance to oxidative stress.

Activating Transcription Factor 4↗

Systems toxicology and the Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) knowledge base.

The National Center for Toxicogenomics is developing the first public toxicogenomics knowledge base that combines molecular expression data sets from transcriptomics, proteomics, metabonomics, and conventional toxicology with metabolic, toxicologcal pathway, and gene regulatory network information relevant to environmental toxicology and human disease. It is called the Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) knowledge base and is designed to meet the information needs of "systems toxicology," involving the study of perturbation by chemicals and stressors, monitoring changes in molecular expression and conventional toxicological parameters, and iteratively integrating biological response data to describe the functioning organism. Based upon functional genomics approaches used successfully in analyzing yeast gene expression data sets, relational and descriptive compendia will be assembled for toxicologically important genes, groups of genes, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and mutant and knockout phenotypes. CEBS data sets will be fully documented in the experimental protocol and therefore searchable by compound, structure, toxicity end point, pathology and point, gene, gene group, SNP, pathway, and network as a function of dose, time, and the phenotype of the target tissue. A knowledge base is being developed by assimilating toxicological, biological, and chemical information from multiple public domain databases and by progressively refining that information about gene, protein, and metabolite expression for classes of chemicals and their biological effects in various species. By analogy to the GenBank database for genome sequences, researchers will globally query (or BLAST) CEBS using a transcriptome of a tissue of interest (or a list of outliers) to have the knowledge base return information on genes, groups of genes, metabolic and toxicological pathways, and contextually associated phenotypic information for compounds that display similar response profiles. With high-quality data content, CEBS will ultimately become a resource to support hypothesis-driven and discovery research that contributes effectively to drug safety and the improvement of risk assessments for chemicals in the environment. The CEBS development effort will span a decade or more.

Computational Biology↗