Biomarker discovery in human cerebrospinal fluid: the need for integrative metabolome and proteome databases

The number of metabolites identified in human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) has steadily increased over the past 5 years, and in this issue of Genome Medicine David Wishart and colleagues provide a comprehensive update that brings the number of metabolites listed in the CSF metabolome database to 476 compounds. There is now a need for an integrative metabolome-proteome CSF database to maximize the impact of this achievement in biomedical research. Only by such efforts can we hope to unravel the complexity of molecular pathophysiological processes.