Sabrina Toro, PhD (Assistant Professor, Genetics) has been awarded an R24 from NIEHS for her project titled “Advancing a community-led zebrafish toxicology phenotype atlas”.
This project proposes to create community-built standards for annotating zebrafish toxicological exposure and their phenotypic outcomes (toxicophenotypes). By designing and deploying a toxicophenotype data model, the project will advance ontologies such as the Zebrafish Phenotype Ontology (ZP). This data model will allow integration and interoperability across species and across toxicological studies. Dr. Toro proposes to create a toxicophenotype annotation toolkit that will allow users to annotate their data conforming to the newly created toxicophenotype data model and ZP, and therefore create “born-interoperable” data. The team will instantiate a zebrafish toxicophenotype atlas web application. This atlas will serve as a visual definition of the standards and their documentation for examining variations of specific phenotypes by laboratories in the community. Users will be able to explore and query exposures and phenotypes of interest and see example images demonstrating the phenotypes.