Nextcast: A software suite to analyse and model toxicogenomics data

Abstract

The recent advancements in toxicogenomics have led to the availability of large omics data sets, representing the starting point for studying the exposure mechanism of action and identifying candidate biomarkers for toxicity prediction. The current lack of standard methods in data generation and analysis hampers the full exploitation of toxicogenomics-based evidence in regulatory risk assessment. Moreover, the pipelines for the preprocessing and downstream analyses of toxicogenomic data sets can be quite challenging to implement. During the years, we have developed a number of software packages to address specific questions related to multiple steps of toxicogenomics data analysis and modelling. In this review we present the Nextcast software collection and discuss how its individual tools can be combined into efficient pipelines to answer specific biological questions. Nextcast components are of great support to the scientific community for analysing and interpreting large data sets for the toxicity evaluation of compounds in an unbiased, straightforward, and reliable manner. The Nextcast software suite is available at: ( https://github.com/fhaive/nextcast).

Keywords

• Nextcast
• Toxicogenomics
• Pipeline
• Software suite
• Computational toxicology
• Predictive toxicology