THE IDENTIFICATION AND TESTING OF INTERACTION PATTERNS

This paper presents a method for identifying and assessing the signifi cance of interaction patterns among various chemicals and chemical cla sses of importance to regulatory toxicologists. To this end, efforts w ere made to assemble and evaluate experimental data on toxicologically significant interactions, to use this information to characterize the consistency of toxicological interactions, and to define classes of c ompounds that display similar toxicological interactions, The motivati on for this effort is to be able to propose hypotheses, which can be v alidated by experimentation, on how 2 or more chemicals will interact.