In human health research, metabolic signatures extracted from metabolomics data are a strong-added value for stratifying patients and identifying biomarkers. Nevertheless, one of the main challenges is to interpret and relate these lists of discriminant metabolites to pathological mechanisms. This task requires experts to combine their knowledge with information extracted from databases and the scientific literature.
However, we show that a large fraction of metabolites are rarely or never mentioned in the literature. Consequently, these overlooked metabolites are often set aside and the interpretation of metabolic signatures is restricted to a subset of the significant metabolites. To suggest potential pathological phenotypes related to these understudied metabolites, we extend the 'guilt by association' principle to literature information by using a Bayesian framework. With this approach, we suggest more than 35,000 associations between 1,047 overlooked metabolites and 3,288 diseases (or disease families). All these newly inferred associations are freely available on the FORUM ftp server and on this FORUM web portal.
This portal centralizes reports with contributors tables for each of the 35,585 extracted and provided associations (LogOdds > 2, Log2FC > 1, Entropy > 1). The alpha version hosts the 35,585 html reports accessible through URI dereferencing. To acces on a particular report, build a valid url by selecting your specie_names in the species labels list, provided by the 1.7 metabolic network and your mesh_labels into descriptor labels.
https://forum-static-files.semantic-metabolomics.fr/1.1/report/report_SPECIE_MESH.html
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version specie ID MeSH ID
e.g.: for the specie M_m01064c (5alpha-androstane-3,17-dione) and the MeSH id D011085 (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) please enter the following URL:
https://forum-static-files.semantic-metabolomics.fr/1.1/report/report_M_m01064c_D011085.html
More information on our preprint: "Suggesting disease associations for overlooked metabolites using literature from metabolic neighbours." available on biorxiv.