Grant: Operating Grant

We've all heard of the genome. But have you ever heard of the metabolome? The metabolome, which comes from the word metabolite, is the collection of all the small molecules that are found in the body. These molecules include things like amino acids, fats and sugars as well as hormones, vitamins and minerals. These compounds are the bricks and mortar of the body. They also allow us to think, eat and breathe. Over the past 3 years we have been identifying the 7500 metabolites, the 1500 drugs and the 3100 toxins or pollutants that can be found in our bodies. In doing so we have assembled this information into a number of databases (DrugBank, The Human Metabolome Database, T3DB), spectral libraries and chemical libraries and made these publicly available. These unique resources provide information about not only the chemicals themselves, but also the genes, the proteins and the diseases with which these compounds are associated. This information is extremely important in diagnosing diseases, identifying drug targets and understanding the fundamentals of human biology. These databases and libraries also contain key information, called "spectral fingerprints" that allow scientists to rapidly identify and quantify hundreds of chemicals at a time using special instruments called NMR and mass spectrometers. For this project we are planning on expanding these resources and developing software to improve what they can do and what they can deliver to the biomedical community. Over the next 5 years we plan on expanding the compound and spectral libraries, enhancing the content in the databases, creating new databases specific to foods and drug metabolites, developing novel software to improve the annotation of small molecule compounds, creating new computer programs to improve the identification of small molecules from blood and urine and developing novel software tools to model metabolic diseases on the computer.