After researchers coined the term "metabolomics" in 1998, it appeared in only one or two papers per year. But bolstered by decades of research in analytical chemistry, the field—which focuses on the complete set of small molecule metabolites in a cell, tissue, or organism—rapidly adopted its newfound identity: In 2008, over 500 papers mentioned the word "metabolomics." With growing stacks of literature filled with spectral data, concentrations, chemical structures, and more, the field developed an acute need for ways to process and share information.
"In the world of human metabolomics, you didn't have a database, so if someone found a new metabolite, it stayed there in the paper," says David Wishart, a computational biologist at the University of Alberta. So he decided to build one.
In 2004, with funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Genome Canada, Wishart began the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB), part of ...
