ABSTRACT
Enzymes play essential roles in all life processes and are used extensively in the biomedical and biotechnological fields. However, enzyme-related information is spread across multiple resources making its retrieval time-consuming. In response to this challenge, the Enzyme Portal has been established to facilitate enzyme research, by providing a freely available hub where researchers can easily find and explore enzyme-related information. It integrates relevant enzyme data for a wide range of species from various resources such as UniProtKB, PDBe and ChEMBL. Here, we describe what type of enzyme-related data the Enzyme Portal provides, how the information is organized and, by show-casing two potential use cases, how to access and retrieve it.
Subject(s)
Enzymes , Knowledge BasesABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) Metadata Framework is an established and widely used set of open source community specifications and software tools for enabling discovery, exchange, and publication of metadata from experiments in the life sciences. The original ISA software suite provided a set of user-facing Java tools for creating and manipulating the information structured in ISA-Tab-a now widely used tabular format. To make the ISA framework more accessible to machines and enable programmatic manipulation of experiment metadata, the JSON serialization ISA-JSON was developed. RESULTS: In this work, we present the ISA API, a Python library for the creation, editing, parsing, and validating of ISA-Tab and ISA-JSON formats by using a common data model engineered as Python object classes. We describe the ISA API feature set, early adopters, and its growing user community. CONCLUSIONS: The ISA API provides users with rich programmatic metadata-handling functionality to support automation, a common interface, and an interoperable medium between the 2 ISA formats, as well as with other life science data formats required for depositing data in public databases.
Subject(s)
Biological Science Disciplines , Metadata , Databases, Factual , SoftwareABSTRACT
MetaboLights is a database for metabolomics studies, their raw experimental data and associated metadata. The database is cross-species and cross-technique and it covers metabolite structures and their reference spectra as well as their biological roles and locations. MetaboLights is the recommended metabolomics repository for a number of leading journals and ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life science information. In this article, we describe the significant updates that we have made over the last two years to the resource to respond to the increasing amount and diversity of data being submitted by the metabolomics community. We refreshed the website and most importantly, our submission process was completely overhauled to enable us to deliver a far more user-friendly submission process and to facilitate the growing demand for reproducibility and integration with other 'omics. Metabolomics resources and data are available under the EMBL-EBI's Terms of Use via the web at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights and under Apache 2.0 at Github (https://github.com/EBI-Metabolights/).
Subject(s)
Databases, Factual , Metabolome , Metabolomics/methods , Software , Animals , HumansABSTRACT
Following similar global efforts to exchange genomic and other biomedical data, global databases in metabolomics have now been established. MetaboLights, the first general purpose, publically available, cross-species, cross-application database in metabolomics, has become the fastest growing data repository at the European Bioinformatics Institute in terms of data volume. Here we present the automated assembly of species metabolomes in MetaboLights, a crucial reference for chemical biology, which is growing through user submissions.
