This is a poster presentation delivered at the Nanosafety 2013 conference, November 2013, Saarbruecken, Germany: http://nanosafety.inm-gmbh.de/<br><br>Disclaimers:<br><br>(1) this presentation has not undergone peer review<br><br>(2) this presentation may report preliminary results which may have been revised in subsequent publications<br><br>(3) no endorsement by third parties should be inferred<br><br>Presentation abstract:<br>
<p>A number of EU projects have been established to address
concerns about the potential health risks posed by nanomaterials. The
NanoPUZZLES project is developing new computational methods for predicting the toxicity
of nanomaterials based on Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSARs),
chemical category formation and read-across approaches. Successful application
of these approaches requires sufficient quantities of high quality toxicological
and physicochemical data on well-characterised nanomaterials to be organised
self-consistently within an electronic database. NanoPUZZLES is contributing to
the development of such a database based on data curated from public domain
sources.</p>
<p>Initial data collection efforts within NanoPUZZLES yielded a
significant number of data points from various peer-reviewed publications. By
extending the Klimisch criteria for toxicological data quality assessment, criteria
for assessing the quality of data reported for nanomaterials, as well as the
suitability of datasets for building QSARs, were developed. However, organising
nanomaterial data remains a challenge. The current focus of data collection
efforts within NanoPUZZLES is the exploration and evaluation of standards for
organising experimental data for nanomaterials: the recently published
ISA-Tab-Nano file format is of particular interest. The need for a unique
identifier for nanomaterials and minimum information standards for a
nanomaterials database is also being addressed. </p>
<p>Funding through the European Commission 7th Framework
Program NanoPUZZLES (FP7-NMP-2012-SMALL-6, Grant Agreement no. 309837) and NanoBRIDGES
(FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES, Grant Agreement no. 295128) projects is gratefully
acknowledged.</p><p>N.B. The spreadsheet images provided in this poster, of provisional NanoPUZZLES files, are used with permission from Microsoft. </p>
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