Geschmack ist vorhersagbar: Mit FlavorMiner. FlavorMiner heißt das Tool, das IPB-Chemiker und Partner aus Kolumbien jüngst entwickelt haben. Das Programm kann, basierend auf maschinellem Lernen (KI), anhand der…
Seit Februar 2021 bietet Wolfgang Brandt, ehemaliger Leiter der Arbeitsgruppe Computerchemie am IPB, sein Citizen Science-Projekt zur Pilzbestimmung an. Dafür hat er in regelmäßigen Abständen öffentliche Vorträge zur Vielfalt…
Toxicology has been an active research field for many decades, with academic, industrial and government involvement. Modern omics and computational approaches are changing the field, from merely disease-specific observational models into target-specific predictive models. Traditionally, toxicology has strong links with other fields such as biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine. With the rise of synthetic and new engineered materials, alongside ongoing prioritisation needs in chemical risk assessment for existing chemicals, early predictive evaluations are becoming of utmost importance to both scientific and regulatory purposes. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe. To coordinate the linkage of various life science efforts around modern predictive toxicology, the establishment of a new ELIXIR Community is seen as instrumental. In the past few years, joint efforts, building on incidental overlap, have been piloted in the context of ELIXIR. For example, the EU-ToxRisk, diXa, HeCaToS, transQST, and the nanotoxicology community have worked with the ELIXIR TeSS, Bioschemas, and Compute Platforms and activities. In 2018, a core group of interested parties wrote a proposal, outlining a sketch of what this new ELIXIR Toxicology Community would look like. A recent workshop (held September 30th to October 1st, 2020) extended this into an ELIXIR Toxicology roadmap and a shortlist of limited investment-high gain collaborations to give body to this new community. This Whitepaper outlines the results of these efforts and defines our vision of the ELIXIR Toxicology Community and how it complements other ELIXIR activities.
Publikation
Amara, A.; Frainay, C.; Jourdan, F.; Naake, T.; Neumann, S.; Novoa-del-Toro, E. M.; Salek, R. M.; Salzer, L.; Scharfenberg, S.; Witting, M.;Networks and graphs discovery in metabolomics data analysis and interpretationFrontiers in Molecular Biosciences9841373(2022)DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2022.841373
Both targeted and untargeted mass spectrometry-based metabolomics approaches are used to understand the metabolic processes taking place in various organisms, from prokaryotes, plants, fungi to animals and humans. Untargeted approaches allow to detect as many metabolites as possible at once, identify unexpected metabolic changes, and characterize novel metabolites in biological samples. However, the identification of metabolites and the biological interpretation of such large and complex datasets remain challenging. One approach to address these challenges is considering that metabolites are connected through informative relationships. Such relationships can be formalized as networks, where the nodes correspond to the metabolites or features (when there is no or only partial identification), and edges connect nodes if the corresponding metabolites are related. Several networks can be built from a single dataset (or a list of metabolites), where each network represents different relationships, such as statistical (correlated metabolites), biochemical (known or putative substrates and products of reactions), or chemical (structural similarities, ontological relations). Once these networks are built, they can subsequently be mined using algorithms from network (or graph) theory to gain insights into metabolism. For instance, we can connect metabolites based on prior knowledge on enzymatic reactions, then provide suggestions for potential metabolite identifications, or detect clusters of co-regulated metabolites. In this review, we first aim at settling a nomenclature and formalism to avoid confusion when referring to different networks used in the field of metabolomics. Then, we present the state of the art of network-based methods for mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data analysis, as well as future developments expected in this area. We cover the use of networks applications using biochemical reactions, mass spectrometry features, chemical structural similarities, and correlations between metabolites. We also describe the application of knowledge networks such as metabolic reaction networks. Finally, we discuss the possibility of combining different networks to analyze and interpret them simultaneously.
Publikation
Wijnker, E.; Harashima, H.; Müller, K.; Parra-Nuñez, P.; de Snoo, C. B.; van de Belt, J.; Rajjou, L.; Bayer, M.; Pradillo, M.; Schnittger, A.;The Cdk1/Cdk2 homolog CDKA;1 controls the recombination landscape in ArabidopsisProc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.11612534-12539(2019)DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1820753116
Little is known how patterns of cross-over (CO) numbers and distribution during meiosis are established. Here, we reveal that cyclin-dependent kinase A;1 (CDKA;1), the homolog of human Cdk1 and Cdk2, is a major regulator of meiotic recombination in Arabidopsis. Arabidopsis plants with reduced CDKA;1 activity experienced a decrease of class I COs, especially lowering recombination rates in centromere-proximal regions. Interestingly, this reduction of type I CO did not affect CO assurance, a mechanism by which each chromosome receives at least one CO, resulting in all chromosomes exhibiting similar genetic lengths in weak loss-of-function cdka;1 mutants. Conversely, an increase of CDKA;1 activity resulted in elevated recombination frequencies. Thus, modulation of CDKA;1 kinase activity affects the number and placement of COs along the chromosome axis in a dose-dependent manner.
Publikation
Peters, K.; Bradbury, J.; Bergmann, S.; Capuccini, M.; Cascante, M.; de Atauri, P.; Ebbels, T. M. D.; Foguet, C.; Glen, R.; Gonzalez-Beltran, A.; Günther, U. L.; Handakas, E.; Hankemeier, T.; Haug, K.; Herman, S.; Holub, P.; Izzo, M.; Jacob, D.; Johnson, D.; Jourdan, F.; Kale, N.; Karaman, I.; Khalili, B.; Emami Khoonsari, P.; Kultima, K.; Lampa, S.; Larsson, A.; Ludwig, C.; Moreno, P.; Neumann, S.; Novella, J. A.; O'Donovan, C.; Pearce, J. T. M.; Peluso, A.; Piras, M. E.; Pireddu, L.; Reed, M. A. C.; Rocca-Serra, P.; Roger, P.; Rosato, A.; Rueedi, R.; Ruttkies, C.; Sadawi, N.; Salek, R. M.; Sansone, S.-A.; Selivanov, V.; Spjuth, O.; Schober, D.; Thévenot, E. A.; Tomasoni, M.; van Rijswijk, M.; van Vliet, M.; Viant, M. R.; Weber, R. J. M.; Zanetti, G.; Steinbeck, C.;PhenoMeNal: processing and analysis of metabolomics data in the cloudGigaScience8giy149(2019)DOI: 10.1093/gigascience/giy149
BackgroundMetabolomics is the comprehensive study of a multitude of small molecules to gain insight into an organism's metabolism. The research field is dynamic and expanding with applications across biomedical, biotechnological, and many other applied biological domains. Its computationally intensive nature has driven requirements for open data formats, data repositories, and data analysis tools. However, the rapid progress has resulted in a mosaic of independent, and sometimes incompatible, analysis methods that are difficult to connect into a useful and complete data analysis solution.FindingsPhenoMeNal (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) is an advanced and complete solution to set up Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that brings workflow-oriented, interoperable metabolomics data analysis platforms into the cloud. PhenoMeNal seamlessly integrates a wide array of existing open-source tools that are tested and packaged as Docker containers through the project's continuous integration process and deployed based on a kubernetes orchestration framework. It also provides a number of standardized, automated, and published analysis workflows in the user interfaces Galaxy, Jupyter, Luigi, and Pachyderm.ConclusionsPhenoMeNal constitutes a keystone solution in cloud e-infrastructures available for metabolomics. PhenoMeNal is a unique and complete solution for setting up cloud e-infrastructures through easy-to-use web interfaces that can be scaled to any custom public and private cloud environment. By harmonizing and automating software installation and configuration and through ready-to-use scientific workflow user interfaces, PhenoMeNal has succeeded in providing scientists with workflow-driven, reproducible, and shareable metabolomics data analysis platforms that are interfaced through standard data formats, representative datasets, versioned, and have been tested for reproducibility and interoperability. The elastic implementation of PhenoMeNal further allows easy adaptation of the infrastructure to other application areas and ‘omics research domains.