COSMOS · Developing an efficient e-infrastructure, standards and data-flow for metabolomics and its interface to biomedical and life science e-infrastructures in Europe and world-wide

Metabolomics is an important phenotyping technique for molecular biology and medicine. It assesses the molecular state of an organism or collections of organisms through the comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of all small molecules in cells, tissues, and body fluids. Metabolic processes are at the core of physiology. Consequently, metabolomics is ideally suited as a medical tool to characterise disease states in organisms, as a tool to assessment of organism for their suitability in, for example, renewable energy production or for biotechnological applications in general.We now see the emergence of metabolomics databases and repositories in various subareas of metabolomics and the emergence of large general e-infrastructures in the life sciences. In particular the BioMedBridges project is set to link a variety of European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI)'s projects, such as ELIXIR and BBMRI.Metabolomics generates large and diverse sets of analytical data and therefore impose significant challenges for the above mentioned e-infrastructures.We will therefore develop policies to ensure that Metabolomics data is<br/>1.\tEncoded in open standards to allow barrier-free and wide-spread analysis.2.\tTagged with a community-agreed, complete set of metadata (minimum information standard).3.\tSupported by a communally developed set of open source data management and capturing tools.4.\tDisseminated in open-access databases adhering to the above standards.5.\tSupported by vendors and publishers, who require deposition upon publication6.\tProperly interfaced with data in other biomedical and life-science e-infrastructures (such as ELIXIR, BioMedBridges, EU-Openscreen).<br/>In order to achieve this, we have assembled the COSMOS (CCOordination of Standards in MetabOlomicS) consortium of leading European groups in Metabolomics and we will interface with all interested players in Metabolomics world-wide in the Metabolomics community and beyond.