Plastics are widespread pollutants found in atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems due to their extensive usage and environmental persistence. Plastic additives, that are intentionally added to achieve specific functionality in plastics, can potentially leach into the environment upon plastic degradation and pose considerable risk to ecological and human health (Maddela et al., 2023). Previously, the lack of information on the presence of such plastic additives throughout the plastics life cycle hampered the process of their regulatory risk assessment and eventually compromised the product safety. To bridge this knowledge gap, we leveraged the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework and constructed a stressor-centric AOP network to get a holistic understanding of plastic additives-induced toxicity.

Here, we present the first stressor-AOP networks for 1287 plastic additives associated with 322 high quality and complete AOPs from AOP-Wiki. This version of the stressor-AOP network was released on 27 March 2024.

In this website, each stressor-AOP network consists of stressor-AOP links with varying coverage scores and levels of relevance. Moreover, the stressor is linked to its corresponding priority use sectors and the AOPs are linked to their corresponding disease categories.

The coverage score of a stressor-AOP link is defined as the ratio of number of Key Events (KEs) within that AOP associated with the stressor to the total number of KEs within that AOP (Chai et al., 2021).

The level of relevance is a qualitative measure used to understand the relevance of the stressor-AOP associations, and are defined as follows:

• Level 1: The stressor is associated with at least one KE within an AOP, where the KE is neither Molecular Initiating Event (MIE) nor Adverse Outcome (AO) within that AOP.
• Level 2: The stressor is associated with at least one AO within an AOP, but not associated with any MIE within that AOP.
• Level 3: The stressor is associated with at least one MIE within an AOP, but not associated with any AO within that AOP.
• Level 4: The stressor is associated with at least one MIE and one AO within an AOP.
• Level 5: The stressor is associated with at least one MIE and one AO within an AOP and there exists a directed path between the associated MIE and AO.

The plastic additives in this website are identifiable by their Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) registry numbers. Users can browse through all plastic additives or plastic additives categorized by priority use sectors.