DIMet: An open-source tool for Differential analysis of targeted Isotope-labeled Metabolomics data.

Abstract

MOTIVATION Many diseases, such as cancer, are characterized by an alteration of cellular metabolism allowing cells to adapt to changes in the microenvironment. Stable isotope-resolved metabolomics and downstream data analyses are widely used techniques for unraveling cells' metabolic activity to understand the altered functioning of metabolic pathways in the diseased state. While a number of bioinformatic solutions exist for the differential analysis of Stable Isotope-Resolved Metabolomics data, there is currently no available resource providing a comprehensive toolbox. RESULTS In this work, we present DIMet, a one-stop comprehensive tool for differential analysis of targeted tracer data. DIMet accepts metabolite total abundances, isotopologue contributions, and isotopic mean enrichment, and supports differential comparison (pairwise and multi-group), time-series analyses, and labeling profile comparison. Moreover, it integrates transcriptomics and targeted metabolomics data through network-based metabolograms. We illustrate the use of DIMet in real SIRM datasets obtained from Glioblastoma P3 cell-line samples. DIMet is open-source, and is readily available for routine downstream analysis of isotope-labeled targeted metabolomics data, as it can be used both in the command line interface or as a complete toolkit in the public Galaxy Europe and Workfow4Metabolomics web platforms. AVAILABILITY DIMet is freely available at https://github.com/cbib/DIMet, and through https://usegalaxy.eu and https://workflow4metabolomics.usegalaxy.fr. All the datasets are available at Zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/10925786. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.