Identifying and meeting community needs
Our partnership aims to improve UK-wide metabolic phenotyping capability and training for the benefit of UK biomedical research. An essential part of this is listening to the UK research community and collaboratively constructing guidance for how we pursue analytical, bioinformatic and training capability development in a manner that addresses the needs of scientists, epidemiologists and clinical researchers. In our RoadMAP/UK community outreach activity, we asked for your help to identify and understand unmet needs and challenges in four core areas of metabolic phenotyping application. We identified seven priority areas for action. This is what we learned, and how we’re moving forward in support of the UK biomedical research community.
1. Accessible expert support for the design of metabolic phenotyping experiments
MAP/UK actions: Design and deliver a web-based knowledge repository, F.A.Q., and communications portal that allows UK researchers interested in designing metabolic phenotyping experiments to access the expertise of MAP/UK partners.
2. Training on commonly adopted procedures for sample collection, storage, and analysis, with an eye towards standardising and merging data coming from many labs and maintaining consistent data quality
MAP/UK actions: Make publicly available and promote procedures for sample collection, storage and analysis as used across MAP/UK partner labs. Additionally, to develop training materials and integrate them within MAP/UK partner courses which address these specific topics.
3. clear terminology and nomenclature with respect to bioanalytical and bioinformatics approaches for metabolomics and lipidomics
MAP/UK actions: Construct a web-based glossary for metabolomics and lipidomics, linking to existing educational resources within MAP/UK and across the broader network.
4. material to clearly guide non-practitioner end-users on bioanalytical assay validation requirements.
MAP/UK actions: Perform an expert review of existing guidance (e.g. FDA, EMA), formulate and publicise our recommended adaptations for the metabolomics/lipidomics field.
5. Promote the re-use of datasets, including via more accurate MetID for novel metabolites, including metabolite ID confidence
MAP/UK actions: Engage with EMBL-EBI to facilitate ease of data storage and accessibility, and empower MAP/UK partners in dataset reuse and powering MetID efforts by sharing of chemical reference materials and data across partnership.
6. Engagement with other consortia and task groups worldwide to relay trends in metabolic phenotyping to the UK user community and to represent the interests of UK biomedical researchers at these worldwide consortia
MAP/UK actions: Individual partners to engage directly and integrate with consortia and task groups, and maintain a list of personnel engagements on MAP/UK website with short-reports made
7. Make metabolic phenotyping data more directly intelligible and usable to end users
MAP/UK actions: Develop and promote targeted metabolite panel assays and open-source tools for deriving pre-annotated metabolite panel data from untargeted profiling data, and facilitating the upload of such data to MetaboLights.