2023–2024 Toxicological Sciences Paper of the Year

Members of the Society of Toxicology Board of Publications meet annually to consider every paper published in Toxicological Sciences over the previous July–June 12-month period. The Board also takes member nominations into consideration and then selects one as the Paper of the Year for making significant contributions to toxicology. As a top journal in the field of toxicology, it is always a difficult task! The award is presented at the Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting, held in March.

This year, the winner is:

Identification of an adverse outcome pathway (AOP) for chemical-induced craniofacial anomalies using the transgenic zebrafish model

Shujie Liu, Toru Kawanishi, Atsuko Shimada, Naohiro Ikeda, Masayuki Yamane, Hiroyuki Takeda, Junichi Tasaki

Toxicological Sciences, Volume 196, Issue 1, November 2023, Pages 38–51, https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfad078.

This article describes the establishment of an adverse outcome pathway for the identification of craniofacial anomalies, one of the most frequent birth defects world-wide. Using a sox10-EGFP zebrafish reporter line, it was shown that when these cells were exposed to known mammalian teratogens, the corresponding cranial neural crest cells migration and subsequent morphogenesis of the first pharyngeal arch were impaired at 24 h post-fertilization. In addition, the studies showed that cell proliferation and apoptosis of the migratory CNCCs were disturbed. These would constitute key events of the adverse outcome pathway and thus important for risk assessment, as the developmental processes of cranial neural crest cells have been found to be highly conserved between zebrafish and mammals. As such, these findings may have important public health protection relevance. The Board of Publications proudly confers the Paper of the Year Award to Dr Tasaki and the entire research team.

The Board also felt that there was one additional paper that was deserving of Honorable Mention:

Development of a human liver microphysiological co-culture system for higher throughput chemical safety assessment

Blanche C. Ip, Samantha J. Madnick, Sophia Zheng, Tessa C. A. van Tongeren, Susan J. Hall, Hui Li, Suzanne Martin, Sandrine Spriggs, Paul Carmichael, Wei Chen, David Ames, Lori A. Breitweiser, Heather E. Pence, Andrew J. Bowling, Kamin J. Johnson, Richard Cubberley, Jeffrey R. Morgan, Kim Boekelheide

Toxicological Sciences, Volume 199, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 227–245, https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfae018.

This article describes the development of a scalable microphysiological co-culture system using human-differentiated HepaRG liver cells to form 3D human liver microtissues. This system was shown to produce a differentiated hepatocyte phenotype, including abundant mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, and bile canaliculi and correspondingly displayed robust protein expression of critical liver biomarkers (albumin, asialoglycoprotein receptor, Phase I cytochrome P450 [CYP3A4] enzyme, multidrug resistance-associated protein 2 transporter, and glycogen) and were also shown to exhibit Phase I/II enzyme activities. Demonstration of its ability to exhibit human liver metabolism capable of perturbing target tissue was shown in the context of testosterone-mediated androgen receptor responses.

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