Data Repository for Automated Metabolomics Administration (DRAMA)

DRAMA framework was primarily developed with the purpose of facilitating data integration into genome scale models (GEM) of cellular metabolism. The existence of differently annotated genome scale models and metabolomics datasets that are provided without generic metabolite identifiers (such as KEGG, SEED, or CHEBI ids) requires a community effort in order to come up with standardize ways for model and metabolomics automated annotation. Three such efforts that aim to uniquely identify metabolites and reactions through databases have been published [1-3]. Besides the problems regarding standardization of model annotation, the current methodologies available for the analysis of metabolic models require that a lot of manual work is performed in order to match the metabolomics data to the corresponding metabolites in the models when integrating this data into the model. This work can become easily cumbersome when one is manipulating many different datasets from different sources, where metabolite nomenclatures seldom match between data sources & GEM and identifiers are from different databases or not provided. DRAMA is built as a toolbox that aims to combine standardization of data & GEM annotation along with an integrative analysis framework which is independent of model curation.