After the U.S. Senate last week passed S. 697 to modernize the federal law that controls commercial chemicals, Congress launched negotiations to resolve differences between that bill and a similar measure approved by the House of Representatives.

The House cleared its slimmer version of the legislation (H.R. 2576) to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in June.

...Aside from possible TSCA reform implementation, OPPT will have its hands full. During 2015, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT):

A federal study is raising concerns about the impacts of hormone-disrupting chemicals on fish at national wildlife refuges across the Northeast, including two Maine refuges where nearly every smallmouth bass showed potential effects of chemical exposure.

Three perfluoroalkyl ethyl containing substances that repel grease and water can no longer be used to coat paper that comes into contact with food sold in the U.S., on Jan. 4. FDA's action comes in response to a 2014 petition by environmental and public health groups that claim the chemicals are linked to cancer and birth defects.

The substances have been used in microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes, fast-food wrappers, and other paper food packaging. The chemicals have not been made in the U.S. since 2011. But food packaging that contains the compounds could be made in other countries and imported into the U.S., FDA says.

A wide range of chemical compound databases are currently available for pharmaceutical research. To retrieve compound information, including structures, researchers can query these chemical databases using non-systematic identifiers. These are source-dependent identifiers (e.g., brand names, generic names), which are usually assigned to the compound at the point of registration. The correctness of non-systematic identifiers (i.e., whether an identifier matches the associated structure) can only be assessed manually, which is cumbersome, but it is possible to automatically check their ambiguity (i.e., whether an identifier matches more than one structure). In this study we have quantified the ambiguity of non-systematic identifiers within and between eight widely used chemical databases. We also studied the effect of chemical structure standardization on reducing the ambiguity of non-systematic identifiers.

Results

The ambiguity of non-systematic identifiers within databases varied from 0.1 to 15.2% (median 2.5%). Standardization reduced the ambiguity only to a small extent for most databases. A wide range of ambiguity existed for non-systematic identifiers that are shared between databases (17.7-60.2%, median of 40.3%). Removing stereochemistry information provided the largest reduction in ambiguity across databases (median reduction 13.7 percentage points).

Conclusions

Ambiguity of non-systematic identifiers within chemical databases is generally low, but ambiguity of non-systematic identifiers that are shared between databases, is high. Chemical structure standardization reduces the ambiguity to a limited extent. Our findings can help to improve database integration, curation, and maintenance.

WASHINGTON -- [Today], the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), and NIH's National Toxicology Program (NTP) within the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) are announcing a new challenge that will award up to $1 million to improve the relevance and predictivity of data generated from automated chemical screening technology used for toxicity testing.

Out of thousands of chemicals in commerce today, very few have been fully evaluated for potential health effects. Scientists from EPA, NIEHS/NTP, and NCATS are using high-throughput screening (HTS) assays to evaluate the potential health effects of thousands of chemicals. High-throughput screening uses automated methods that allow for a large number of chemicals to be rapidly evaluated for a specific type of biological activity.