Zebrafish AC₅₀ modelling: (Q)SAR models to predict developmental toxicity in zebrafish embryo

Developmental toxicity refers to the occurrence of adverse effects on a developing organism as a consequence of exposure to hazardous chemicals. The assessment of developmental toxicity has become relevant to the safety assessment process of chemicals. The zebrafish embryo developmental toxicology assay is an emerging test used to screen the teratogenic potential of chemicals and it is proposed as a promising test to replace teratogenic assays with animals. Supported by the increased availability of data from this test, the developmental toxicity assay with zebrafish has become an interesting endpoint for the in silico modelling. The purpose of this study was to build up quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models. In this work, new in silico models for the evaluation of developmental toxicity were built using a well-defined set of data from the ToxCast^TM Phase I chemical library on the zebrafish embryo. Categorical and continuous QSAR models were built by gradient boosting machine learning and the Monte Carlo technique respectively, in accordance with Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development principles and their statistical quality was satisfactory. The classification model reached balanced accuracy 0.89 and Matthews correlation coefficient 0.77 on the test set. The regression model reached correlation coefficient R² 0.70 in external validation and leave-one-out cross-validated Q² 0.73 in internal validation.