Chemical Genomic Study of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in Metabolic Pathways

Endocrine disrupting activities in industrial chemicals have been a serious problem, because they are distributed broadly, they are active at very low concentrations, and some of them are difficult to detoxify. Moreover, only a small number of active chemicals are known, while most chemicals have not been examined yet. To reduce the number of examinations required for unknown chemicals, some computational prediction methods have been proposed. In this study, we propose a chemical genomic approach to understand the relationship between activities and chemical structures. Our approach revealed the existence of synthetic and degradation chains in metabolic pathway maps. At the end of the degradation chains, we found certain oxidization enzymes that appeared frequently. We also confirmed our prediction by performing a bioassay experiment. The results would help us to find potential detoxifying microorganisms. In addition, our method can be applied to other types of toxic chemicals, such as cancer-causing agents.