RaMP-DB 2.0: a renovated knowledgebase for deriving biological and chemical insight from metabolites, proteins, and genes

Bioinformatics. 2023 Jan 1;39(1):btac726. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac726.

Abstract

Motivation: Functional interpretation of high-throughput metabolomic and transcriptomic results is a crucial step in generating insight from experimental data. However, pathway and functional information for genes and metabolites are distributed among many siloed resources, limiting the scope of analyses that rely on a single knowledge source.

Results: RaMP-DB 2.0 is a web interface, relational database, API and R package designed for straightforward and comprehensive functional interpretation of metabolomic and multi-omic data. RaMP-DB 2.0 has been upgraded with an expanded breadth and depth of functional and chemical annotations (ClassyFire, LIPID MAPS, SMILES, InChIs, etc.), with new data types related to metabolites and lipids incorporated. To streamline entity resolution across multiple source databases, we have implemented a new semi-automated process, thereby lessening the burden of harmonization and supporting more frequent updates. The associated RaMP-DB 2.0 R package now supports queries on pathways, common reactions (e.g. metabolite-enzyme relationship), chemical functional ontologies, chemical classes and chemical structures, as well as enrichment analyses on pathways (multi-omic) and chemical classes. Lastly, the RaMP-DB web interface has been completely redesigned using the Angular framework.

Availability and implementation: The code used to build all components of RaMP-DB 2.0 are freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/ncats/ramp-db, https://github.com/ncats/RaMP-Client/ and https://github.com/ncats/RaMP-Backend. The RaMP-DB web application can be accessed at https://rampdb.nih.gov/.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural

MeSH terms

  • Databases, Factual
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Knowledge Bases
  • Metabolomics*
  • Proteins
  • Software*

Substances

  • Proteins