Integrated metabolomics data analysis to generate mechanistic hypotheses with MetaProViz

The lack of standardised workflows and ambiguous metabolite annotations hampers metabolomics integration with prior knowledge, thus limiting the extraction of meaningful biological insights. We present MetaProViz (Metabolomics Processing, functional analysis and Visualization), an open-source Bioconductor R package for metabolomics data analysis that integrates prior knowledge to generate mechanistic hypotheses ( https://saezlab.github.io/MetaProViz/ ). MetaProViz operates on annotated intensity values and offers a flexible framework consisting of five modules: processing, differential analysis, prior knowledge integration, functional analysis and visualisation, applicable to intracellular and exometabolomics experiments. To improve functional analysis, we created the Metabolism Signature Database (MetSigDB), a collection of annotated metabolite sets. MetSigDB includes pathway-metabolite, metabolite-receptor, metabolite-transporter sets, and chemical class-metabolite sets. MetaProViz enables the conversion of gene sets to metabolite sets, metabolite identifier expansion and analyses mapping ambiguities. The MetaProViz functional analysis toolkit includes sample metadata analysis, enrichment analysis and biologically informed clustering. By applying MetaProViz to kidney cancer metabolomics data, we identified increased methionine usage in line with decreased methionine levels in tumour samples. In summary, MetaProViz facilitates and improves the analysis and interpretation of metabolomics data.