title: Unveiling new biological relationships using shared hits of chemical screening assay pairs.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Although the integration and analysis of the activity of small molecules across multiple chemical screens is a common approach to determine the specificity and toxicity of hits, the suitability of these approaches to reveal novel biological information is less explored. Here, we test the hypothesis that assays sharing selective hits are biologically related.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We annotated the biological activities (i.e. biological processes or molecular activities) measured in assays and constructed chemical hit profiles with sets of compounds differing on their selectivity level for 1640 assays of ChemBank repository. We compared the similarity of chemical hit profiles of pairs of assays with their biological relationships and observed that assay pairs sharing non-promiscuous chemical hits tend to be biologically related. A detailed analysis of a network containing assay pairs with the highest hit similarity confirmed biological meaningful relationships. Furthermore, the biological roles of predicted molecular targets of the shared hits reinforced the biological associations between assay pairs.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and German Center for Diabetes Research, Helmholtz Center Munich, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and German Center for Diabetes Research, Helmholtz Center Munich, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Xueping
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and German Center for Diabetes Research, Helmholtz Center Munich, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and German Center for Diabetes Research, Helmholtz Center Munich, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Campillos
mesh_terms: D062126:Databases, Chemical; D057166:High-Throughput Screening Assays / Q000379:methods*; D010641:Phenotype; D011506:Proteins / Q000037:antagonists & inhibitors
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins