CRESTA: a comprehensive transcriptome atlas for cellular response to external stressors

Area of Science:

• Molecular Biology
• Toxicology
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Cellular stress response (CSR) is vital for maintaining homeostasis against environmental stressors.
• Failure in CSR can lead to cell death and disease.
• Existing data on CSR is fragmented across various sources.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop CRESTA, a comprehensive, integrated database for studying stressor-induced CSR.
• To unify and structure fragmented transcriptomic data related to CSR.
• To facilitate mechanistic studies of cytotoxicity and drug discovery.

Main Methods:

• Integrated transcriptomic data from 8258 samples across 197 human cell types.
• Differential expression analysis to identify stress-associated genes.
• Hierarchical structuring of data by stressor categories and sub-categories.

Main Results:

• CRESTA catalogs 20,786 unique stress-associated genes across 14 major categories of human cellular stressors.
• The database links CSR signatures to functional pathways, cell death, and disease associations.
• CSR profiles are connected with chemical perturbation data for drug repurposing.

Conclusions:

• CRESTA provides a unified resource for exploring stressor-induced CSR.
• The database supports causal inference between stressors, molecular pathologies, and disease.
• CRESTA is a valuable tool for cytotoxicity evaluation and CSR-targeted drug discovery.