The expert system for toxicity prediction of chemicals based on structure-activity relationship.

The prediction systems of chemical toxicity has been developed by means of structure-activity relationship based on the computerized fact database (BL-DB). Numbers and ratio of elements, side chains, bonding, position, and microenvironment of side chains were used as structural factors of the chemical for the prediction. Such information was obtained from the BL-DB database by Wiswesser line-formula chemical notation. In the present study, the Salmonella/microsome assay was chosen as indicative of the target toxicity of chemicals. A set of chemicals specified with mutagenicity data was retrieved, and necessary information was extracted and transferred to the working file. Rules of the relations between characteristics of chemical structure and the assay result are extracted as parameters for rules by experts on the rearranged data set. These were analyzed statistically by the discriminant analysis and the prediction with the rules were evaluated by the elimination method. Eight kinds of rules to predict Salmonella/microsome assay were constructed, and currently results of the assay on aliphatic and heterocyclic compounds can be predicted as accurately as +90%.