The Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) is a comprehensive, high-quality, freely accessible, online database of small molecule metabolites found in the human body. Created by the Human Metabolome Project funded by Genome Canada. One of the first dedicated metabolomics databases, the HMDB facilitates human metabolomics research, including the identification and characterization of human metabolites using NMR spectroscopy, GC-MS spectrometry and LC/MS spectrometry. To aid in this discovery process, the HMDB contains three kinds of data: 1) chemical data, 2) clinical data, and 3) molecular biology/ biochemistry data (Fig. 1–3). The chemical data includes 41,514 metabolite structures with detailed descriptions along with nearly 10,000 NMR, GC-MS and LC/MS spectra. The clinical data includes information on >10,000 metabolite-

biofluid Body fluids, bodily fluids, or biofluids, sometimes body liquids, are liquids within the human body. In lean healthy adult men, the total body water is about 60% (60–67%) of the total body weight; it is usually slightly lower in women (52-55%). ...

concentrations and metabolite concentration information on more than 600 different human

diseases A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical conditions that ar ...

. The biochemical data includes 5,688 protein (and DNA) sequences and more than 5000

biochemical reaction Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology and ...

s that are linked to these metabolite entries. Each metabolite entry in the HMDB contains more than 110 data fields with 2/3 of the information being devoted to chemical/clinical data and the other 1/3 devoted to enzymatic or biochemical data. Many data fields are hyperlinked to other databases ( KEGG,

MetaCyc The MetaCyc database is one of the largest metabolic pathways and enzymes databases currently available. The data in the database is manually curated from the scientific literature, and covers all domains of life. MetaCyc has extensive information ...

, PubChem, Protein Data Bank, ChEBI,

Swiss-Prot UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...

, and GenBank) and a variety of structure and pathway viewing applets. The HMDB database supports extensive text, sequence, spectral, chemical structure and relational query searches. It has been widely used in metabolomics, clinical chemistry, biomarker discovery and general biochemistry education. Four additional databases, DrugBank, T3DB, SMPDB and FooDB are also part of the HMDB suite of databases. DrugBank contains equivalent information on ~1600 drug and drug metabolites, T3DB contains information on 3100 common toxins and environmental pollutants, SMPDB contains pathway diagrams for 700 human metabolic and disease pathways, while FooDB contains equivalent information on ~28,000 food components and

food additive Food additives are substances added to food to preserve flavor or enhance taste, appearance, or other sensory qualities. Some additives have been used for centuries as part of an effort to preserve food, for example vinegar (pickling), salt (salt ...

Version history

The first version of HMDB was released on January 1, 2007, followed by two subsequent versions on January 1, 2009 (version 2.0), August 1, 2009 (version 2.5), September 18, 2012 (version 3.0) and Jan. 1, 2013 (version 3.5), 2017 (version 4.0). Details for each of the major HMDB versions (up to version 4.0) is provided in Table 1.

Scope and access

All data in HMDB is non-proprietary or is derived from a non-proprietary source. It is freely accessible and available to anyone. In addition, nearly every data item is fully traceable and explicitly referenced to the original source. HMDB data is available through a public web interface and downloads.

References

{{Genomics Metabolomic databases Medical databases Biological databases Food databases Human metabolites

Version history

Scope and access

See also

References