Posts Tagged ‘metabolites’

BridgeDb: now also with metabolite identifier mapping

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Ha, fooled ya! BridgeDb has been able to deal with metabolite identifiers since the beginning. But mapping genes is such a common problem that metabolites aren’t getting any attention. Nearly all the code examples that we have thus far are with genes.

Somebody on the mailinglist asked for an example with metabolites. Well here you go, you’ll see it’s really easy. This example takes the ChEBI identifier for methionine, and looks up the corresponding PubChem identifier.

// Using the BridgeRest webservice as mapping
// service, it does compound mapping fairly well.
// We select the human species, but it doesn't really
// matter which species we pick.
Class.forName ("org.bridgedb.webservice.bridgerest.BridgeRest");
IDMapper mapper = BridgeDb.connect(
    "idmapper-bridgerest:http://webservice.bridgedb.org/Human");

// Start with defining the Chebi identifier for
// Methionine, id 16811
Xref src = new Xref("16811", BioDataSource.CHEBI);

// the method returns a set, but actually there is only one result
for (Xref dest : mapper.mapID(src, BioDataSource.PUBCHEM))
{
    // this should print 6137,
    // the pubchem identifier for Methionine.
    System.out.println ("" + dest.getId());
}

Compile this example with org.bridgedb.jar, org.bridgedb.bio.jar and org.bridgedb.webservice.bridgerest.jar in the classpath, which can be downloaded from http://bridgedb.org/data/releases/

BatchMapper v0.1

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

I just released the first working version of a new tool called batchmapper. This tool lets you take a list of gene, protein or metabolite identifiers from one database and translate them to a different database.

638px-beta-d-glucose-from-xtal-3d-balls
Why is this useful? I’ll explain for metabolites, although the story is really the same for genes and proteins. Metabolites are the chemical compounds that you find naturally in the human body. Of course a lot of research is being done on metabolites, and the collected wisdom is available in a number of online databases, such as Kegg in Japan, PubChem in the USA, ChEBI in the UK and HMDB in Canada

The glut of online databases has lead to a tower of Babel of metabolite identifiers. Glucose, one of the most important compounds in our body, may be known as HMDB00122 in Canada, C00031 in Japan, 5793 in the USA or 17634 in the UK.

batchmapper is a spin-off from recent work done by JJ and me. It’s a command line tool, so it’s not very user friendly, but it is fast, flexible and completely automatic. The translation tables can be provided in the form of text files, relational databases or webservices, or even a combination thereof. This early release is completely functional. Check out the tutorial, and leave some comments here on this blog.

It would be nice if all the online metabolite databases worked together and merged into a single resource, but I don’t see that happening in the near future. At least batchmapper helps to make the problem a little more manageable.