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Roman Eisner

Bio: Roman Eisner is an academic researcher from University of Alberta. The author has contributed to research in topics: Metabolome & Colorectal cancer. The author has an hindex of 22, co-authored 30 publications receiving 12452 citations. Previous affiliations of Roman Eisner include International Agency for Research on Cancer & National Institute for Nanotechnology.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Human Metabolome Database is designed to address the broad needs of biochemists, clinical chemists, physicians, medical geneticists, nutritionists and members of the metabolomics community.
Abstract: 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. This is further supplemented with thousands of NMR and MS spectra collected on purified, reference metabolites. Each metabolite entry in the HMDB contains an average of 90 separate data fields including a comprehensive compound description, names and synonyms, structural information, physico-chemical data, reference NMR and MS spectra, biofluid concentrations, disease associations, pathway information, enzyme data, gene sequence data, SNP and mutation data as well as extensive links to images, references and other public databases. Extensive searching, relational querying and data browsing tools are also provided. The HMDB is designed to address the broad needs of biochemists, clinical chemists, physicians, medical geneticists, nutritionists and members of the metabolomics community. The HMDB is available at: www.hmdb.ca

2,670 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: New database visualization tools and new data content have been added or enhanced to the HMDB, which includes better spectral viewing tools, more powerful chemical substructure searches, an improved chemical taxonomy and better, more interactive pathway maps.
Abstract: The Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) (www.hmdb.ca) is a resource dedicated to providing scientists with the most current and comprehensive coverage of the human metabolome. Since its first release in 2007, the HMDB has been used to facilitate research for nearly 1000 published studies in metabolomics, clinical biochemistry and systems biology. The most recent release of HMDB (version 3.0) has been significantly expanded and enhanced over the 2009 release (version 2.0). In particular, the number of annotated metabolite entries has grown from 6500 to more than 40,000 (a 600% increase). This enormous expansion is a result of the inclusion of both 'detected' metabolites (those with measured concentrations or experimental confirmation of their existence) and 'expected' metabolites (those for which biochemical pathways are known or human intake/exposure is frequent but the compound has yet to be detected in the body). The latest release also has greatly increased the number of metabolites with biofluid or tissue concentration data, the number of compounds with reference spectra and the number of data fields per entry. In addition to this expansion in data quantity, new database visualization tools and new data content have been added or enhanced. These include better spectral viewing tools, more powerful chemical substructure searches, an improved chemical taxonomy and better, more interactive pathway maps. This article describes these enhancements to the HMDB, which was previously featured in the 2009 NAR Database Issue. (Note to referees, HMDB 3.0 will go live on 18 September 2012.).

2,656 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The most recent release of HMDB has been significantly expanded and enhanced over the previous release, with the number of fully annotated metabolite entries growing from 2180 to more than 6800, a 300% increase.
Abstract: The Human Metabolome Database (HMDB, http://www.hmdb.ca) is a richly annotated resource that is designed to address the broad needs of biochemists, clinical chemists, physicians, medical geneticists, nutritionists and members of the metabolomics community. Since its first release in 2007, the HMDB has been used to facilitate the research for nearly 100 published studies in metabolomics, clinical biochemistry and systems biology. The most recent release of HMDB (version 2.0) has been significantly expanded and enhanced over the previous release (version 1.0). In particular, the number of fully annotated metabolite entries has grown from 2180 to more than 6800 (a 300% increase), while the number of metabolites with biofluid or tissue concentration data has grown by a factor of five (from 883 to 4413). Similarly, the number of purified compounds with reference to NMR, LC-MS and GC-MS spectra has more than doubled (from 380 to more than 790 compounds). In addition to this significant expansion in database size, many new database searching tools and new data content has been added or enhanced. These include better algorithms for spectral searching and matching, more powerful chemical substructure searches, faster text searching software, as well as dedicated pathway searching tools and customized, clickable metabolic maps. Changes to the user-interface have also been implemented to accommodate future expansion and to make database navigation much easier. These improvements should make the HMDB much more useful to a much wider community of users.

1,748 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: DrugBank 3.0 represents the result of 2 years of manual annotation work aimed at making the database much more useful for a wide range of ‘omics’ applications, particularly with regard to drug target, drug description and drug action data.
Abstract: DrugBank (http://www.drugbank.ca) is a richly annotated database of drug and drug target information. It contains extensive data on the nomenclature, ontology, chemistry, structure, function, action, pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, metabolism and pharmaceutical properties of both small molecule and large molecule (biotech) drugs. It also contains comprehensive information on the target diseases, proteins, genes and organisms on which these drugs act. First released in 2006, DrugBank has become widely used by pharmacists, medicinal chemists, pharmaceutical researchers, clinicians, educators and the general public. Since its last update in 2008, DrugBank has been greatly expanded through the addition of new drugs, new targets and the inclusion of more than 40 new data fields per drug entry (a 40% increase in data ‘depth’). These data field additions include illustrated drug-action pathways, drug transporter data, drug metabolite data, pharmacogenomic data, adverse drug response data, ADMET data, pharmacokinetic data, computed property data and chemical classification data. DrugBank 3.0 also offers expanded database links, improved search tools for drug–drug and food–drug interaction, new resources for querying and viewing drug pathways and hundreds of new drug entries with detailed patent, pricing and manufacturer data. These additions have been complemented by enhancements to the quality and quantity of existing data, particularly with regard to drug target, drug description and drug action data. DrugBank 3.0 represents the result of 2 years of manual annotation work aimed at making the database much more useful for a wide range of ‘omics’ (i.e. pharmacogenomic, pharmacoproteomic, pharmacometabolomic and even pharmacoeconomic) applications.

1,732 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
16 Feb 2011-PLOS ONE
TL;DR: This work has combined targeted and non-targeted NMR, GC-MS and LC-MS methods with computer-aided literature mining to identify and quantify a comprehensive, if not absolutely complete, set of metabolites commonly detected and quantified (with today's technology) in the human serum metabolome.
Abstract: Continuing improvements in analytical technology along with an increased interest in performing comprehensive, quantitative metabolic profiling, is leading to increased interest pressures within the metabolomics community to develop centralized metabolite reference resources for certain clinically important biofluids, such as cerebrospinal fluid, urine and blood. As part of an ongoing effort to systematically characterize the human metabolome through the Human Metabolome Project, we have undertaken the task of characterizing the human serum metabolome. In doing so, we have combined targeted and non-targeted NMR, GC-MS and LC-MS methods with computer-aided literature mining to identify and quantify a comprehensive, if not absolutely complete, set of metabolites commonly detected and quantified (with today's technology) in the human serum metabolome. Our use of multiple metabolomics platforms and technologies allowed us to substantially enhance the level of metabolome coverage while critically assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of these platforms or technologies. Tables containing the complete set of 4229 confirmed and highly probable human serum compounds, their concentrations, related literature references and links to their known disease associations are freely available at http://www.serummetabolome.ca.

1,423 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis.
Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

13,246 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A practical guide to the analysis and visualization features of the cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics, which makes complex cancer genomics profiles accessible to researchers and clinicians without requiring bioinformatics expertise, thus facilitating biological discoveries.
Abstract: The cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics (http://cbioportal.org) provides a Web resource for exploring, visualizing, and analyzing multidimensional cancer genomics data. The portal reduces molecular profiling data from cancer tissues and cell lines into readily understandable genetic, epigenetic, gene expression, and proteomic events. The query interface combined with customized data storage enables researchers to interactively explore genetic alterations across samples, genes, and pathways and, when available in the underlying data, to link these to clinical outcomes. The portal provides graphical summaries of gene-level data from multiple platforms, network visualization and analysis, survival analysis, patient-centric queries, and software programmatic access. The intuitive Web interface of the portal makes complex cancer genomics profiles accessible to researchers and clinicians without requiring bioinformatics expertise, thus facilitating biological discoveries. Here, we provide a practical guide to the analysis and visualization features of the cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics.

10,947 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Reactome Knowledgebase provides molecular details of signal transduction, transport, DNA replication, metabolism and other cellular processes as an ordered network of molecular transformations—an extended version of a classic metabolic map, in a single consistent data model.
Abstract: The Reactome Knowledgebase (www.reactome.org) provides molecular details of signal transduction, transport, DNA replication, metabolism and other cellular processes as an ordered network of molecular transformations-an extended version of a classic metabolic map, in a single consistent data model. Reactome functions both as an archive of biological processes and as a tool for discovering unexpected functional relationships in data such as gene expression pattern surveys or somatic mutation catalogues from tumour cells. Over the last two years we redeveloped major components of the Reactome web interface to improve usability, responsiveness and data visualization. A new pathway diagram viewer provides a faster, clearer interface and smooth zooming from the entire reaction network to the details of individual reactions. Tool performance for analysis of user datasets has been substantially improved, now generating detailed results for genome-wide expression datasets within seconds. The analysis module can now be accessed through a RESTFul interface, facilitating its inclusion in third party applications. A new overview module allows the visualization of analysis results on a genome-wide Reactome pathway hierarchy using a single screen page. The search interface now provides auto-completion as well as a faceted search to narrow result lists efficiently.

5,065 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This year’s update, DrugBank 5.0, represents the most significant upgrade to the database in more than 10 years and significant improvements have been made to the quantity, quality and consistency of drug indications, drug binding data as well as drug-drug and drug-food interactions.
Abstract: DrugBank (www.drugbank.ca) is a web-enabled database containing comprehensive molecular information about drugs, their mechanisms, their interactions and their targets. First described in 2006, DrugBank has continued to evolve over the past 12 years in response to marked improvements to web standards and changing needs for drug research and development. This year's update, DrugBank 5.0, represents the most significant upgrade to the database in more than 10 years. In many cases, existing data content has grown by 100% or more over the last update. For instance, the total number of investigational drugs in the database has grown by almost 300%, the number of drug-drug interactions has grown by nearly 600% and the number of SNP-associated drug effects has grown more than 3000%. Significant improvements have been made to the quantity, quality and consistency of drug indications, drug binding data as well as drug-drug and drug-food interactions. A great deal of brand new data have also been added to DrugBank 5.0. This includes information on the influence of hundreds of drugs on metabolite levels (pharmacometabolomics), gene expression levels (pharmacotranscriptomics) and protein expression levels (pharmacoprotoemics). New data have also been added on the status of hundreds of new drug clinical trials and existing drug repurposing trials. Many other important improvements in the content, interface and performance of the DrugBank website have been made and these should greatly enhance its ease of use, utility and potential applications in many areas of pharmacological research, pharmaceutical science and drug education.

4,797 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
17 Oct 2007-Nature
TL;DR: A strategy to understand the microbial components of the human genetic and metabolic landscape and how they contribute to normal physiology and predisposition to disease.
Abstract: A strategy to understand the microbial components of the human genetic and metabolic landscape and how they contribute to normal physiology and predisposition to disease.

4,730 citations