Data standards can boost metabolomics research, and if there is a will, there is a way.

Thousands of articles using metabolomics approaches are published every year. With the increasing amounts of data being produced, mere description of investigations as text in manuscripts is not sufficient to enable re-use anymore: the underlying data needs to be published together with the findings in the literature to maximise the benefit from public and private expenditure and to take advantage of an enormous opportunity to improve scientific reproducibility in metabolomics and cognate disciplines. Reporting recommendations in metabolomics started to emerge about a decade ago and were mostly concerned with inventories of the information that had to be reported in the literature for consistency.

1H NMR-based profiling reveals differential immune-metabolic networks during influenza virus infection in obese mice.

Obese individuals are at greater risk for death from influenza virus infection. Paralleling human evidence, obese mice are also more susceptible to influenza infection mortality. However, the underlying mechanisms driving greater influenza severity in the obese remain unclear.

Modelling short time series in metabolomics: a functional data analysis approach.

Metabolomics is the study of the complement of small molecule metabolites in cells, biofluids and tissues. Many metabolomic experiments are designed to compare changes observed over time under two or more experimental conditions (e.g.

Time-resolved metabolic footprinting for nonlinear modeling of bacterial substrate utilization.

Untargeted profiling of small-molecule metabolites from microbial culture supernatants (metabolic footprinting) has great potential as a phenotyping tool. We used time-resolved metabolic footprinting to compare one Escherichia coli and three Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains growing on complex media and show that considering metabolite changes over the whole course of growth provides much more information than analyses based on data from a single time point. Most strikingly, there was pronounced selectivity in metabolite uptake, even when the bacteria were growing apparently exponentially, with certain groups of metabolites not taken up until others had been entirely depleted from the medium.

Human metabolic phenotype diversity and its association with diet and blood pressure.

Metabolic phenotypes are the products of interactions among a variety of factors-dietary, other lifestyle/environmental, gut microbial and genetic. We use a large-scale exploratory analytical approach to investigate metabolic phenotype variation across and within four human populations, based on 1H NMR spectroscopy. Metabolites discriminating across populations are then linked to data for individuals on blood pressure, a major risk factor for coronary heart disease and stroke (leading causes of mortality worldwide).

Comparative metabonomics of differential hydrazine toxicity in the rat and mouse.

Interspecies variation between rats and mice has been studied for hydrazine toxicity using a novel metabonomics approach. Hydrazine hydrochloride was administered to male Sprague-Dawley rats (30 mg/kg, n = 10 and 90 mg/kg, n = 10) and male B6C3F mice (100 mg/kg, n = 8 and 250 mg/kg, n = 8) by oral gavage. In each species, the high dose was selected to produce the major histopathologic effect, hepatocellular lipid accumulation.