Curation of food-relevant chemicals in ToxCast

- Chemical use information is important context needed for interpreting and analyzing large datasets.
- Manual curation of food-relevant chemicals in ToxCast integrated current-day, US chemical usage information.
- Manual curation re-categorizated ∼30% of previously identified ToxCast food-relevant chemicals and eliminated 319 chemicals.
- 1211 food-use chemicals in ToxCast were confirmed by manual curation.
- 1154 food-use chemicals were also confirmed by use categorization from the globally-sourced CPCat database.

High-throughput in vitro assays and exposure prediction efforts are paving the way for modeling chemical risk; however, the utility of such extensive datasets can be limited or misleading when annotation fails to capture current chemical usage. To address this data gap and provide context for food-use in the United States (US), manual curation of food-relevant chemicals in ToxCast was conducted. Chemicals were categorized into three food-use categories: (1) direct food additives, (2) indirect food additives, or (3) pesticide residues. Manual curation resulted in 30% of chemicals having new annotation as well as the removal of 319 chemicals, most due to cancellation or only foreign usage. These results highlight that manual curation of chemical use information provided significant insight affecting the overall inventory and chemical categorization. In total, 1211 chemicals were confirmed as current day food-use in the US by manual curation; 1154 of these chemicals were also identified as food-related in the globally sourced chemical use information from Chemical/Product Categories database (CPCat). The refined list of food-use chemicals and the sources highlighted for compiling annotated information required to confirm food-use are valuable resources for providing needed context when evaluating large-scale inventories such as ToxCast.