MSEA

MSEA performs metabolite set enrichment analysis to identify biologically meaningful patterns in metabolite concentration changes using predefined and custom metabolite sets.

Key Features:

• Predefined Metabolite Sets Library: Contains approximately 1,000 metabolite sets covering metabolic pathways, disease states, biofluids, and tissue locations.
• Enrichment Analysis Types: Supports Overrepresentation Analysis (ORA) requiring only a list of compound names, and Single Sample Profiling (SSP) plus Quantitative Enrichment Analysis (QEA) which require compound names with concentrations.
• Custom Metabolite Sets: Accepts user-defined metabolite sets, including non-mammalian and specialized sets.
• Data Interpretation and Visualization: Generates graphs and tables linked to pathway images and disease descriptors for result interpretation.
• Database Identifier Conversion: Converts between common metabolite names, synonyms, and major database identifiers.

Scientific Applications:

• Metabolic pathway elucidation: Identifies metabolic pathways exhibiting coordinated changes in metabolite concentrations.
• Disease biomarker discovery: Detects metabolite sets associated with disease states for biomarker identification.
• Tissue-specific metabolic variation analysis: Characterizes metabolic differences across biofluids and tissue locations.
• Detection of coordinated metabolite changes: Reveals subtle, coordinated alterations among related metabolites that may be missed by conventional analyses.

Methodology:

MSEA applies ORA, SSP, and QEA to predefined (~1,000) or custom metabolite sets using inputs of compound names and optionally concentrations, performs identifier conversion between names/synonyms and database IDs, and outputs graphs and tables linked to pathway images and disease descriptors.