The U.S. Tox21 Federal collaboration, which currently quantifies the biological effects of nearly 10,000 chemicals via quantitative high-throughput screening(qHTS) in in vitro model systems, is now making an effort to incorporate gene expression profiling into the existing battery of assays. Whole transcriptome analyses performed on large numbers of samples using microarrays or RNA-Seq is currently cost-prohibitive. Accordingly, the Tox21 Program is pursuing a high-throughput transcriptomics (HTT) method that focuses on the targeted detection of gene expression for a carefully selected subset of the transcriptome that potentially can reduce the cost by a factor of 10-fold, allowing for the analysis of larger numbers of samples. To identify the optimal transcriptome subset, genes were sought that are (1) representative of the highly diverse biological space, (2) capable of serving as a proxy for expression changes in unmeasured genes, and (3) sufficient to provide coverage of well described biological pathways. A hybrid method for gene selection is presented herein that combines data-driven and knowledge-driven concepts into one cohesive method.

This dataset is associated with the following publication: Mav, D., R.R. Shah, B.E. Howard, S.S. Auerbach, P.R. Bushel, J.B. Collins, D.L. Gerhold, R. Judson, A.L. Karmaus, E.A. Maull, D.L. Mendrick, B.A. Merrick, N.S. Sipes, D. Svoboda, and R.S. Paules. A hybrid gene selection approach to create the S1500+ targeted gene sets for use in high-throughput transcriptomics. PLoS ONE. Public Library of Science, San Francisco, CA, USA, 13(2): 1-17, (2018).