The Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI)
WG description | WG chairs/members | WG list email address | WG list subscribe |
---|---|---|---|
Biological context metadata WG | Don Robertson, Jules Griffin, Wayne Matson, Mariet van der Werf, Basil Nikolau, Dawn Field | msi-workgroups-bio-metadata | https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msi-workgroups-bio-metadata |
Chemical analysis WG | Lloyd Sumner, Teresa Fan | msi-workgroups-chemical-analysis | https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msi-workgroups-chemical-analysis |
Data processing WG | Roy Goodacre | msi-workgroups-data-processing | https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msi-workgroups-data-processing |
Ontology WG | Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Daniel Schober, Ricardo Pietrobon | msi-workgroups-ontology | https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msi-workgroups-ontology |
Exchange format WG | Nigel Hardy, Chris Taylor | msi-workgroups-exchange-format | https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msi-workgroups-exchange-format |
Original working group chairs
What is New?
COSMOS (COordination Of Standards In MetabOlomicS) - a global effort to enable free and open sharing of metabolomics data. Coordinated by EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, COSMOS (Coordination of Standards in Metabolomics) has brought together European metabolomics data providers to set and promote community standards.
Data standards: The COSMOS work on standardisation was built on the foundational work by PSI and MSI and further develop and contribute to data exchange formats, ranging from raw data in MS and NMR, the reporting of metabolite quantification and metabolite identification, to the experimental metadata. COSMOS has extended the open standards for MS data exchange initiated by PSI, such as mzML and mzQuantML to meet the requirement of metabolomics standards for reporting MS experiments.
COSMOS has also developed the missing open standard, the NMR Markup Language (nmrML) for capturing and disseminating Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy raw data in metabolomics, including data converter web services to ease nmrML generation from proprietary vendor has formats. In addition COSMOS implemented a semantic validation set-up to check nmrML raw data on plausibility and completeness, contributing to open access processing quality assurance and robust long term storage, more details at (http://nmrml.org/). The first dataset with the nmrML data format can be found at MetaboLights- MTBLS1.
Linking with e-infrastructures: In addition to capturing and storing extremely large volumes of data, e-infrastructures must be capable of disseminating these data based on open and widely accepted community standards. Such initiatives were well timed, as it coincided with the development of repositories such as MetaboLights (www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights) and the growing support for life science e-infrastructures such as ELIXIR, EU-OPENSCREEN and BBMRI and NIH funded Metabolomics Works Bench.
MetabolomeXchange: To foster distribution of experimental metabolomics data among the research community, COSMOS has setup RSS based solutions to federate data available from the leading metabolomics data repositories (MetaboLights, Metabolomic Repository Bordeaux, Max Planck Institute - MPIMP and Metabolomics Workbench). To this end, we have initiated the MetabolomeXchange consortium, currently comprised of four metabolomics data providers. The www.metabolomeXchange.org web site, was officially launched in June 1st 2014, during the Metabolomics 2014 conference in Japan later that month. In the months after several improvements were made and on September 1st 2015 MX released a completely new version. MX facilitates access and linkage to publically available datasets and is updated automatically every hour, contributing to dissemination of metabolomics data globally.
History: The Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI) was conceived in 2005, as an initiative of Metabolomics Society activities, now coordinated by the Data Standards Task Group of the Society. The MSI is an academic policy provider, to support the development of open data and metadata formats for metabolomics. MSI followed on earlier work by the Standard Metabolic Reporting Structure initiative (report) and the Architecture for Metabolomics consortium (ArMet). The early efforts of MSI were focused on community-agreed reporting standards, the so called minimal information (MI) checklists and data exchange formats to support the MIs reporting standards. MSI aims was to provide a clear description of the biological system studied and all components of a metabolomics study as well as to allow data to be efficiently applied, shared and reused. Out of 2004-2007 society meetings and discussions five working groups were established. For example, the chemical analysis group proposed minimum information for reporting chemical analysis, including minimum metadata reporting related to metabolite identification. Therefore, several cross-communicating working groups were built to cover the development of different aspects of metabolomics experiment data standardisation
Working Groups: The following MSI WGs were created to reflect on different areas in metabolomics standards.