ExposomeX: Development of an Integrative Exposomic Platform to Expedite Discovery of the “Exposure−Biology−Disease” Nexus
Bin Wang, Changxin Lan, Guohuan Zhang, Mengyuan Ren, Tao Wu, Ning Gao, Weinan Lin, Yanqiu Feng, Han Zhang, Bahabake Jiangtulu, Yuting Wang, Shu Su, Zhijian Liu, Xuqiang Shao, Fanrong Zhao, Bo Peng, Xiaotong Ji, Xiaojia Chen, Min Nian, Junjie Yang, Mingliang Fang
Abstract
We proposed presenting a novel integrated platform, ExposomeX, that was created to expedite discovery of the "exposure-biology-disease" nexus. This platform has six major functions, i.e., exposome database (E-DB), biological link (E-BIO), statistical analysis (E-STAT), mass spectrometry data processing (E-MS), meta-analysis (E-META), and data visualization (E-VIZ). Twenty-three supporting databases were curated for this platform, encompassing the exposome and diseases together with their related biological pathways and molecules, to build their interaction network. The network nodes included up to 119,247,057 unique exposures, 17,186 diseases, 153,780 proteins, 19,122 metabolites, and 572,278 annotated pathways, while the network links included 10 interaction modes, e.g., exposure and protein (3,971,005 pairs), exposure and GO (28,632 pairs), protein and disease (10,153 pairs), gene and disease (108,298,474 pairs), GO and disease (3,085,406 pairs), and associations between exposures and diseases for meta-analysis and review summary (1244 pairs). ExposomeX allows effective analysis of multidimensional exposomic data as well as investigations of the "exposure-biology-disease" nexus through explorations of the association strengths, which was well-validated by reanalyzing three typical multiomics data sets. All the aforementioned functions were implemented using R programming and integrated into a web-based server to enhance user interaction through an online interactive platform (http://www.exposomex.cn).