Canadian scientists have announced the completion of the first draft of the human metabolome, the chemical equivalent of the human genome, as published in the latest issue of Nucleic Acid Research (full text freely accessible). The metabolome is the complete complement of all small molecule chemicals (metabolites) found in or produced by an organism.

The Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) is currently the most complete and comprehensive curated collection of human metabolite and human metabolism data in the world. It contains records for more than 2180 endogenous metabolites with information gathered from thousands of books, journal articles and electronic databases. In addition to its comprehensive literature-derived data, the HMDB also contains an extensive collection of experimental metabolite concentration data compiled from hundreds of mass spectra (MS) and Nuclear Magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomic analyses performed on urine, blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples.

They believe that the HMDB will have a significant impact on the diagnosis, prediction, prevention and monitoring of many genetic, infectious and environmental diseases, and could have a more immediate impact on medicine and medical practices than the Human Genome Project.

The $7.5 Million project funded by Genome Canada through Genome Alberta, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning, and the University of Alberta will have far reaching benefits to patient care. The database is available at http://www.hmdb.ca/.