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Abstract
Metabolic profiling is one of the pillars of functional genomics, and along with the development of other omics tools for understanding cellular processes there has come a need for high throughput metabolite matching that displays results in a visually intuitive way. A web-based pipeline called MetaLab was developed to facilitate the storage, processing, analysis and retrieval of metabolite profiling data. Retention index and mass spectral similarity coefficient are used for peak matching. Normalization methods are available for assessing relative metabolite abundance for user-defined experimental groups. Matched metabolite sets can be further explored using a variety of analytical and statistical tools. Export of selected metabolites yields Excel spreadsheets displaying the alignment using a multi-color scheme. MetaLab offers a platform that greatly simplifies manual curation of metabolite profiling data, allowing researchers to focus more on the biological interpretation of their data.