metaGraphite - a new layer of pathway annotation to get metabolite networks.

Motivation: Metabolomics is an emerging 'omics' science involving the characterization of metabolites and metabolism in biological systems. Few bioinformatic tools have been developed for the visualization, exploration and analysis of metabolomic data within the context of metabolic pathways: some of them became rapidly obsolete and are no longer supported, others are based on a single database. A systematic collection of existing annotations has the potential of considerably boosting the investigation and contextualization of metabolomic measurements.

Results: We have released a major update of our Bioconductor package graphite which explicitly tracks small molecules within pathway topologies and their interactions with proteins. The package gathers the information stored in eight major databases, oriented both at genes and at metabolites, across 14 different species. Depending on user preferences, all pathways can be retrieved as gene-only, gene-metabolite or metabolite-only networks.

Availability: The new graphite version (1.24) is available on Bioconductor.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online and at the BioConductor repository.