Metabolomics studies aim at linking a study intervention or phenotypic characterisation with metabolomics profiles or changes. This project aims at building and applying bioinformatics and network biology tools to relate plasma metabolome concentration or changes (as obtained from statistical analysis) to phenotypic characteristics or changes.
Lipidomics is a prominent feature of the NMC metabolomics platform. We constructed a lipid pathway/network, including information on organ-specificity, involved processes and diseases. The pathway was curated and literature references are included, as most of this information was lacking in KEGG and other databases. The lipid map includes all lipids that can be measured at the NMC and several other institutes and is built in Pathvisio. Metabolomics study data can be overlayed on top of this pathway to recognize patterns in the results. The network was used to interpret data on studies in the Sino-Dutch Centre and will be used for the interpretation of other associate projects.
In addition, to be able to fully exploit data of studies in the interpretation of new studies, input was given on the development of the NMC data-warehouse of the data support platform. This data-warehouse contains a study capturing module, a clinical chemistry module and a metabolomics module, which are all delivered. The study capture module is can be use to store data of any design (e.g. cross-over) and makes use of templates to be able to store all information necessary. This data-warehouse is developed together with NuGO and NBIC and links to other omics study data via the study capture module (altogether named the metabolic phenotype database). Several other national and international groups and projects adopted this database. All studies performed within NMC will be stored in this data-warehouse.