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Comparison of Cellular Morphological Descriptors and Molecular Fingerprints for the Prediction of Cytotoxicity- and Proliferation-Related Assays

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    Comparison of Cellular Morphological Descriptors and Molecular Fingerprints for the Prediction of Cytotoxicity- and Proliferation-Related Assays
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    Chemical Research in Toxicology

    Cite this: Chem. Res. Toxicol. 2021, 34, 2, 422–437
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    https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.0c00303
    Published February 1, 2021
    Copyright © 2021 American Chemical Society
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    Abstract

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    Cell morphology features, such as those from the Cell Painting assay, can be generated at relatively low costs and represent versatile biological descriptors of a system and thereby compound response. In this study, we explored cell morphology descriptors and molecular fingerprints, separately and in combination, for the prediction of cytotoxicity- and proliferation-related in vitro assay endpoints. We selected 135 compounds from the MoleculeNet ToxCast benchmark data set which were annotated with Cell Painting readouts, where the relatively small size of the data set is due to the overlap of required annotations. We trained Random Forest classification models using nested cross-validation and Cell Painting descriptors, Morgan and ErG fingerprints, and their combinations. While using leave-one-cluster-out cross-validation (with clusters based on physicochemical descriptors), models using Cell Painting descriptors achieved higher average performance over all assays (Balanced Accuracy of 0.65, Matthews Correlation Coefficient of 0.28, and AUC-ROC of 0.71) compared to models using ErG fingerprints (BA 0.55, MCC 0.09, and AUC-ROC 0.60) and Morgan fingerprints alone (BA 0.54, MCC 0.06, and AUC-ROC 0.56). While using random shuffle splits, the combination of Cell Painting descriptors with ErG and Morgan fingerprints further improved balanced accuracy on average by 8.9% (in 9 out of 12 assays) and 23.4% (in 8 out of 12 assays) compared to using only ErG and Morgan fingerprints, respectively. Regarding feature importance, Cell Painting descriptors related to nuclei texture, granularity of cells, and cytoplasm as well as cell neighbors and radial distributions were identified to be most contributing, which is plausible given the endpoint considered. We conclude that cell morphological descriptors contain complementary information to molecular fingerprints which can be used to improve the performance of predictive cytotoxicity models, in particular in areas of novel structural space.

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    • Supplementary Table S1, description of data set; Figure S1, distribution of active and inactive compounds among selected endpoints; Figure S2, distribution of chemical space of 135 compounds used in this study compared to all compounds present in same 12 assays from ToxCast; Figure S3, pairwise Tanimoto similarity (Tc) of compounds in data set used in this study using (a) 166 public MACCS keys and (b) Morgan fingerprints of radius 2 and 2048 nbits and contour graph of Tanimoto similarity coefficients to show molecule similarity using (c) 166 public MACCS keys and (d) Morgan fingerprints of radius 2 and 2048 nbits; Table S2, hyperparameter search spaces for Random Forest model; Table S3, explained variance using first two principal components PC1 and PC2 from PCA and silhouette scores for 5 clusters among selected endpoints; Table S4, aggregated metrics for Random Forest model using shuffle stratified splitting; Table S5, cluster-averaged metrics for Random Forest model using leave-one-cluster-out splitting; Figure S4, Area Under Curve-Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC-ROC) performance of cluster averaged models for 12 assays; Figure S5, Mathew’s correlation constant (MCC) performance of cluster averaged models for 12 assays; Figure S6, Balanced Accuracy (BA) performance of cluster averaged models for 12 assays; and Table S7, feature importance of Cell Painting descriptors (PDF)

    • Table S6, confusion matrices of Random Forest Models (XLSX)

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    Chemical Research in Toxicology

    Cite this: Chem. Res. Toxicol. 2021, 34, 2, 422–437
    Click to copy citationCitation copied!
    https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.0c00303
    Published February 1, 2021
    Copyright © 2021 American Chemical Society
    Request reuse permissions

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