High-Throughput Screening Assays in Toxicology

Alexander Sedykh, Sedykh, Alexander

The nature of high-throughput screening (HTS) puts certain limits on optimal test conditions for each particular sample, therefore, on top of usual data normalization, additional parsing is often needed to account for incomplete read outs or various artifacts that arise from signal interferences.CurveP is a heuristic, user-tunable, curve-cleaning algorithm that attempts to find a minimum set of corrections, which would give a monotonic dose-response curve. After applying the corrections, the algorithm proceeds to calculate a set of numeric features, which can be used as a fingerprint characterizing the sample, or as a vector of independent variables (e.g., molecular descriptors in case of chemical substances testing). The resulting output can be a part of HTS data analysis or can be used as input for a broad spectrum of computational applications, such as Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) modeling, computational toxicology, bio- and cheminformatics.