Introduction and Organizers
On the 18-19th of July we will hold a meeting in Cambridge (UK) at which we will:

1. Establish a coordinated effort to generate appropriate data format and reporting standards for a range of experiment types and technologies appropriate to both metabolomics and metabonomics ('systems metabolomics')
   
2. Discuss general organisational matters for the UK and Europe (status of the SMRS group, relationship to the Metabolomics Society)
   
3. Consider the wider functional genomics context and discuss the coordination of development with the transcriptomics and proteomics standards communities (for example, the description of biological source material is seldom omics-specific)

The ‘omics’ suffix is rather overused these days, but clearly several major technological and biological domains do merit its application; amongst these are transcriptomics, proteomics and of course metabol/nomics. For the generation of public standards (data formats, controlled terminology and reporting guidelines) there are clear focal points for the first two of these communities (MGED and HUPO PSI respectively); the standards developed under the umbrellas of these organisations are continually increasing both the quality of data and its annotation, and the ease with which data can be exchanged, disseminated and analysed.
The fields concerned with the study of metabolites, whether on a cellular or systems scale, are now also moving towards a unified standards development process. We can now conceive of a body that is in principle representative of the field in the UK and Europe; both as a forum for interested parties and as a voice on the global stage. This new organisation will consist of an expansion of the Standard Metabolic Reporting Structures (SMRS) Group to become a truly representative body for UK and European metabolomics (both public and private); MetaboMeeting 1.0 will be the venue for the discussion and ratification of this initiative, and for discussion of the wider context (for example, the opportunity to operate under the Metabolomics Society's banner).
Having laid the groundwork for a community process of standards development, both for the study of metabolism in isolation and importantly for integration into an ongoing grand collaboration aimed at producing standards for functional genomics (simply defined as the combination of the three omics already described), the time is now right for a large scale meeting of UK and European academics, industrialists (both ‘pharma’ and technology vendors), government and publishers, to ratify what has been done to date and to consolidate effort, partly through a public project management system (as symbolically important as it is practical).
We have organised a two day meeting at the University of Cambridge on the 18-19th of July. To this meeting we invite academic and industrial researchers, technology vendors, funders, other 'governmental types' and journal representatives from across Europe. This meeting will immediately precede one at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda MD), at which the US metabolomics community (inter alia) will consider similar issues of standardisation [LINK]; several of our confirmed attendees will also travel to this US meeting, affording an opportunity to present a unified UK/European voice in that forum.
The minutes from the exploratory MetaboMeeting 0.1 (which established that this meeting would be useful) can be found here.

Organising Committee

University of Cambridge, UK
Jules Griffin

Metabolic Profiiling Forum
Andy Nicholls

European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK
Chris Taylor
Susanna-Assunta Sansone

Chris Taylor ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), June 29th, 2005