Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology, Leipzig University, 04107 Leipzig, Germany.
LIFE - Leipzig Research Center for Civilization Diseases, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Bioinformatics. 2021 Aug 9;37(15):2218-2220. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa967.
Many diseases have a metabolic background, which is increasingly investigated due to improved measurement techniques allowing high-throughput assessment of metabolic features in several body fluids. Integrating data from multiple cohorts is of high importance to obtain robust and reproducible results. However, considerable variability across studies due to differences in sampling, measurement techniques and study populations needs to be accounted for.
We present Metabolite-Investigator, a scalable analysis workflow for quantitative metabolomics data from multiple studies. Our tool supports all aspects of data pre-processing including data integration, cleaning, transformation, batch analysis as well as multiple analysis methods including uni- and multivariable factor-metabolite associations, network analysis and factor prioritization in one or more cohorts. Moreover, it allows identifying critical interactions between cohorts and factors affecting metabolite levels and inferring a common covariate model, all via a graphical user interface.
We constructed Metabolite-Investigator as a free and open web-tool and stand-alone Shiny-app. It is hosted at https://apps.health-atlas.de/metabolite-investigator/, the source code is freely available at https://github.com/cfbeuchel/Metabolite-Investigator.
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
许多疾病都有代谢背景，由于能够高通量评估多种体液中的代谢特征的测量技术的改进，对代谢背景的研究日益增多。整合来自多个队列的数据对于获得稳健且可重复的结果非常重要。然而，由于采样、测量技术和研究人群的差异，研究之间存在相当大的可变性，需要加以考虑。
我们提出了 Metabolite-Investigator，这是一种可扩展的分析工作流程，用于处理来自多个研究的定量代谢组学数据。我们的工具支持数据预处理的所有方面，包括数据集成、清理、转换、批处理分析以及多种分析方法，包括单变量和多变量因素-代谢物关联、网络分析和一个或多个队列中的因素优先级排序。此外，它还允许通过图形用户界面识别队列之间的关键相互作用以及影响代谢物水平的因素，并推断共同协变量模型。
我们构建了 Metabolite-Investigator 作为一个免费和开放的网络工具和独立的 Shiny 应用程序。它托管在 https://apps.health-atlas.de/metabolite-investigator/ ，源代码可在 https://github.com/cfbeuchel/Metabolite-Investigator 上免费获得。
补充数据可在 Bioinformatics 在线获得。
