New Database Combines Data on Microbes, Their Metabolites, and Their Effects

An international team of researchers has developed a new resource to house data on the human microbiome and the chemicals it produces. The Human Microbial Metabolome Database (MiMeDB) includes multiomic data — genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic as well as exposome data — and incorporates data from other databases like VMH, HMDB, KEGG, GenBank, UniProt, BacMap, FooDB, and HMD in a web-friendly interface. That is, as the researchers note in their Nucleic Acids Research paper presenting the database, MiMeDB includes data on human microbes, their metabolites, and how those metabolites affect people that researchers can query to explore, visualize, and interpret their own data. "We believe that MiMeDB represents the kind of integrated, multiomic or systems biology database that is needed to enable comprehensive multiomic integration," the researchers write, adding that they plan to fill out its data on health effects and exposure sources in the future.