BioSpider: a web server for automating metabolome annotations

One of the growing challenges in life science research lies in finding useful, descriptive or quantitative data about newly reported biomolecules (genes, proteins, metabolites and drugs). An even greater challenge is finding information that connects these genes, proteins, drugs or metabolites to each other. Much of this information is scattered through hundreds of different databases, abstracts or books and almost none of it is particularly well integrated. While some efforts are being undertaken at the NCBI and EBI to integrate many different databases together, this still falls short of the goal of having some kind of human-readable synopsis that summarizes the state of knowledge about a given biomolecule - especially small molecules. To address this shortfall, we have developed BioSpider. BioSpider is essentially an automated report generator designed specifically to tabulate and summarize data on biomolecules - both large and small. Specifically, BioSpider allows users to type in almost any kind of biological or chemical identifier (protein/gene name, sequence, accession number, chemical name, brand name, SMILES string, InCHI string, CAS number, etc.) and it returns an in-depth synoptic report (approximately 3-30 pages in length) about that biomolecule and any other biomolecule it may target. This summary includes physico-chemical parameters, images, models, data files, descriptions and predictions concerning the query molecule. BioSpider uses a web-crawler to scan through dozens of public databases and employs a variety of specially developed text mining tools and locally developed prediction tools to find, extract and assemble data for its reports. Because of its breadth, depth and comprehensiveness, we believe BioSpider will prove to be a particularly valuable tool for researchers in metabolomics. BioSpider is available at: www.biospider.ca