Scientists Map the Human Metabolome

Cache22x writes "Scientists at the University of Alberta have published the first draft of the Human Metabolome Project, the chemical equivalent of the human genome. In the same spirit as the human genome project, the information has been made freely available to the scientific community and the general public through the project's website. Knowing the makeup of the metabolome will lead to potentially enormous medical advances as clinicians now have a comparative base for analyzing the metabolite levels found in our bodies."

Comments

I don't get it

[justthinkit]

How does cataloging 3,000 body chemicals equate with decoding a gigabyte sized blueprint/factory for cell manufacture?

step in the right direction!

[aleator]

to make a database of all compounds of a human is a really great idea. from my point of view (master student in biochemistry + infection biology) it's one of the essential in the right direction to increase the understanding of humans!

i didn't know about this database till now, so i played around alittle bit and find it usefull, but quite hard to use. the problem is more a technical one. if you for example open the entry of biotin here

http://www.hmdb.ca/scripts/show_card.cgi?METABOCAR D=HMDB00030

you see a huge list of nice links that would maybe interest you (PDB, PubChem, KEGG,...) but there is a quite confusing part of such an entry (that's why i have choosen biotin as example, it is quite well known and a big entry) and that is the overview of the node itself related to the enzymes that make, degrade and modify the node. just listening the pathway names, the kegg maps and the SimCell maps, it may contain all the information needed, but it is not at all userfriendly, if you want to browse the metabolome and go from one node to another somewhere completely different... like you wolud be able to do on the big poster one tends to have. of course, the poster is missing a whole lot of information you have in a digital database, but it is much more userfriendly. you can use your finger to follow pathways ;)

of course the enthusiastic biochemists among us would say, that we already have learned this overview in the textbooks and that you should know them by heart anyway.. but for natures (like me) who are more interested interdisciplinary and want to use this database as a browsable map.

some coding experts should sit together with the biologists to code a clickable SVG rendering map for a visual tour trough the metabolome :) ... for the non-molecular-biologists: what i mean is something similar to the KEGG one
http://www.genome.jp/kegg/pathway/map/map00010.htm l
but in a more interactive and more modern way (modern way = vector based, clickable, popups presenting links to other DBs and maybe adding color... or am i asking too much? *smile*).

great work - right step in the right direction!