For 20 years, the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD; https://ctdbase.org) has provided high-quality, literature-based curated content describing how environmental chemicals affect human health. Today, CTD includes over 94 million toxicogenomic connections relating chemicals, genes/proteins, phenotypes, anatomical terms, diseases, comparative species, pathways and exposures. In this 20th year anniversary update, we reflect on CTD's remarkable growth and provide an overview of the increased data content and new features, including enhancements to the curation workflow (e.g. new exposure curation tool and expanded use of natural language processing), added functionality (e.g. improvements to CTD Tetramers and Pathway View tools) and significant upgrades to software and infrastructure. Linking lab-based core curation with real-world human exposure curation via the use of controlled vocabularies facilitates analysis of content across the entire environmental health continuum, from molecular toxicological mechanisms to the population level, and vice versa. The 'prototype database' originally described in 2004 has evolved into a premier, sophisticated, highly cited and well-engineered knowledgebase and discoverybase that is utilized by scientists worldwide to design testable hypotheses about environmental health.
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.