Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on May 8, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Web Server issue):W652-W660; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp356
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. suppl_2 W652-W660
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Articles |
MetaboAnalyst: a web server for metabolomic data analysis and interpretation
1Department of Biological Sciences, 2Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta and 3National Research Council, National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT), Edmonton AB T6G 2E8, Canada
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 780 492 0383; Fax: +1 780 492 5303; Email: david.wishart{at}ualberta.ca
Received February 9, 2009. Revised April 16, 2009. Accepted April 22, 2009.
Metabolomics is a newly emerging field of ‘omics’ research that is concerned with characterizing large numbers of metabolites using NMR, chromatography and mass spectrometry. It is frequently used in biomarker identification and the metabolic profiling of cells, tissues or organisms. The data processing challenges in metabolomics are quite unique and often require specialized (or expensive) data analysis software and a detailed knowledge of cheminformatics, bioinformatics and statistics. In an effort to simplify metabolomic data analysis while at the same time improving user accessibility, we have developed a freely accessible, easy-to-use web server for metabolomic data analysis called MetaboAnalyst. Fundamentally, MetaboAnalyst is a web-based metabolomic data processing tool not unlike many of today's web-based microarray analysis packages. It accepts a variety of input data (NMR peak lists, binned spectra, MS peak lists, compound/concentration data) in a wide variety of formats. It also offers a number of options for metabolomic data processing, data normalization, multivariate statistical analysis, graphing, metabolite identification and pathway mapping. In particular, MetaboAnalyst supports such techniques as: fold change analysis, t-tests, PCA, PLS-DA, hierarchical clustering and a number of more sophisticated statistical or machine learning methods. It also employs a large library of reference spectra to facilitate compound identification from most kinds of input spectra. MetaboAnalyst guides users through a step-by-step analysis pipeline using a variety of menus, information hyperlinks and check boxes. Upon completion, the server generates a detailed report describing each method used, embedded with graphical and tabular outputs. MetaboAnalyst is capable of handling most kinds of metabolomic data and was designed to perform most of the common kinds of metabolomic data analyses. MetaboAnalyst is accessible at http://www.metaboanalyst.ca