NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use $3.4 million from the US Environmental Protection Agency over four years to establish the Carolina Center for Computational Toxicology, where researchers will develop computational toxicology and bioinformatics tools and will conduct interdisciplinary studies with environmental and health science researchers.
The new center “will strengthen our capacity for understanding and predicting the inter-individual differences in risk from environmental exposures,” said UNC School of Public Health Professor Ivan Rusyn in a statement last week.
The center will develop and publish informatics models and tools and will pay “special attention” to the usefulness of the tools to the risk-assessment community and investigative toxicologists.
The center will study protein-protein and protein-chemical interactions in nuclear receptor networks, chemical-perturbed networks, and compounds for predicting pathobiological responses. The researchers also will develop toxicological tools for studying the role of genetic diversity involved in responses to toxicants, as well as predicting outcomes based on genetics using statistical modeling and high-throughput screening.