Fig. 1

Workflow diagram for the collection and integration of metabolomic data from public resources. The literature search resulted in 324 hits and an additional six references were identified from the metabolome repository (MetabolomeXchange). Among the 330 studies identified by the initial search, we excluded 303 studies for the reasons shown in the figure. We finally selected 27 studies suitable for analysis. Among them, data matrices of metabolomic profiles were available for five studies, which were used to investigate whether simple merging of multiple sets of metabolomic data is efficient (left blue box at the bottom). Metabolomic data from all 27 studies were used for our newly proposed method (right blue box at the bottom). The details of the flow chart and how each of the datasets was used are described in the methods