A Metadata Description of the Data in "A Metabolomic Comparison of Urinary Changes in Type 2 Diabetes in Mouse, Rat, and Human."

Background: Metabolomics is a rapidly developing functional genomic tool that has a wide range of applications in diverse fields in biology and medicine. However, unlike transcriptomics and proteomics there is currently no central repository for the depositing of data despite efforts by the Metabolomics Standard Initiative (MSI) to develop a standardised description of a metabolomic experiment.

Findings: In this manuscript we describe how the MSI description has been applied to a published dataset involving the identification of cross-species metabolic biomarkers associated with type II diabetes. The study describes sample collection of urine from mice, rats and human volunteers, and the subsequent acquisition of data by high resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy. The metadata is described to demonstrate how the MSI descriptions could be applied in a manuscript and the spectra have also been made available for the mouse and rat studies to allow others to process the data.

Conclusions: The intention of this manuscript is to stimulate discussion as to whether the MSI description is sufficient to describe the metadata associated with metabolomic experiments and encourage others to make their data available to other researchers.