The FAIR AOP roadmap for 2025: Advancing findability, accessibility, interoperability, and re-usability of adverse outcome pathways

Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs) describe the mechanistic interactions of biological entities with a stressor (chemical, nanomaterial, radiation, virus, etc.) that produce an adverse response. How these interactions and associations are catalogued contributes to our ability to understand mechanistic effects and apply this knowledge to New Approach Methods (NAMs) that have the potential to reduce animal testing in chemical, biological, and material safety assessments. Making AOP data align with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) metadata standards relies on technical tools that implement and process AOP data and related metadata, and the establishment of coordinated and consensus computational bioinformatic methods. Herein current efforts in addressing the FAIRification of AOP mechanistic data and metadata, as well as the international, collaborative efforts to document, and improve the (re)-use and reliability of AOP information will be described. These coordinated efforts contribute to the establishment of a directive for the processing and storing of standardized AOP mechanistic data in the AOP-Wiki repository, and application of these data to next generation risk assessment.