Together with our collaborator Mark Viant in Birmingham, Robert Hall in Wageningen and Laura Reed at the University of Alabama, the MetaboLights team has just published an article where we argue that the mandatory inclusion of discovered lists of metabolites in submissions to the MetaboLights database leads to the automatic or better crowd-sourced assembly of species metabolomes.

Abstract

Following similar global efforts to exchange genomic and other biomedical data, global databases in metabolomics have now been established. MetaboLights, the first general purpose, publically available, cross-species, cross-application database in metabolomics, has become the fastest growing data repository at the European Bioinformatics Institute in terms of data volume. Here we present the automated assembly of species metabolomes in MetaboLights, a crucial reference for chemical biology, which is growing through user submissions.