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MassBank EU

High Quality Mass Spectrometry Reference Database

Quick facts

MassBank EU is a field-specific and the first public repository of mass spectrometry reference spectra. Their target user groups in the domains of chemistry and life sciences are analytical chemists, metabolomics, biochemists, and bioinformaticians. Datasets from community users and projects are openly accessible and represent the official database of the Mass Spectroscopy Society of Japan.

GitHub is used as their current AAI environment (open read access, limited write access), whereas GitHub issues serves as their curation tracking system. The curation itself is performed by the MassBank record validator. The datasets can be searched for compound and mass spectrometry information and peaks. MassBank Record ID (Accession) and USI (Universal Spectrum Identifier) are used as persistent identifier systems. The MassBank EU spectrometric data is hosted in a revision control system with all spectrometric data and the corresponding metadata in a human-readable record format, and continuous integration (CI) checking record integrity for each change. Instances of the web interface are hosted at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) (Leipzig) and Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB) (Halle) and can be installed locally as well. They offer interfaces for data import via Git (MassBank record format) and for data export (JSON-LD) and a REST API. On top of that RMassBank is provided as a separated data processing/analysis tool.

Main authors: ORCID:0000-0002-7899-7192, ORCID:0000-0001-7696-7662, ORCID:0000-0003-4480-8661 and ORCID:0000-0002-5035-7978