Open database encapsulates worldwide knowledge of human metabolism

An international research consortium, headed by the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg, has developed a database that is unique in the world: the Virtual Metabolic Human Database (VMH).

The VMH database is an open source project in which researchers led by Prof. Ines Thiele have systematically collected and aggregated data on human metabolism, diseases, microbial gut flora, and nutrition. At its core, there are hundreds of manually curated genome-scale metabolic reconstructions, which have been assembled based on genomic, biochemical, and physiological data. The VMH facilitates rapid analyses and interpretations of complex data arising from large-scale biomedical studies by enabling complex queries of its content, by providing a detailed graphical representation of human metabolism, and by distributing computational models for simulating human and microbial metabolism.

The results on VMH have been released recently as special interest "breakthrough" article in the scientific journal Nucleic Acids Research. Researchers involved in the creation of the database and co-authors of the paper include SysMedPD members Ronan Fleming, Reinhard Schneider, Jennifer Modamio and German Preciat.