Database Commons
Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Database Profile

MACdb

General information

URL: https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/macdb/home
Full name: A curated knowledgebase for Metabolic Associations across human Cancers
Description: MACdb is a comprehensive knowledgebase based totally on manual curation of cancer metabolic literature, providing high quality metabolite associations, online visualizing networks, and other effective tools for cancer or metabonomics researches. MACdb has curated 40,710 metabolite-cancer associations, covering 269 traits which were extracted from 1,127 studies reported in462 publications (17 cancer categories). knowledge graph is implemented to comprehensively evaluate and visualize associations from metabolite, trait, cancer levels. MACdb embeds an online tool for PubChem Cid mapping and Enrichment analysis, which are helpful for users to standardize and enrich metabolites with no requirement of bioinformatics skills. Users can download all associations from the downloads or the APIs page.
Year founded: 2023
Last update: 2022
Version: 1.0
Accessibility:
Accessible
Country/Region: China

Funding support

  • XDB38050300

Classification & Tag

Data type:
Data object:
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Keywords:

Contact information

University/Institution: Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Address:
City: beijing
Province/State: Beijing
Country/Region: China
Contact name (PI/Team): Xinchang Zheng
Contact email (PI/Helpdesk): zhengxinchang@big.ac.cn

Publications

37027007
MACdb: A Curated Knowledgebase for Metabolic Associations across Human Cancers. [PMID: 37027007]
Sun Y, Zheng X, Wang G, Wang Y, Chen X, Sun J, Xiong Z, Zhang S, Wang T, Fan Z, Bu C, Bao Y, Zhao W.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of human death. As metabolomics techniques become more and more widely used in cancer research, metabolites are increasingly recognized as crucial factors in both cancer diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we developed MACdb (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/macdb), a curated knowledgebase to recruit the metabolic associations between metabolites and cancers. Unlike conventional data-driven resources, MACdb integrates cancer-metabolic knowledge from extensive publications, providing high quality metabolite associations and tools to support multiple research purposes. In the current implementation, MACdb has integrated 40,710 cancer-metabolite associations, covering 267 traits from 17 categories of cancers with high incidence or mortality, based entirely on manual curation from 1,127 studies reported in 462 publications (screened from 5,153 research papers). MACdb offers intuitive browsing functions to explore associations at multi-dimensions (metabolite, trait, study, and publication), and constructs knowledge graph to provide overall landscape among cancer, trait, and metabolite. Furthermore, NameToCid (map metabolite name to PubChem Cid) and Enrichment tools are developed to help users enrich the association of metabolites with various cancer types and traits.

Implication

MACdb paves an informative and practical way to evaluate cancer-metabolite associations and has a great potential to help researchers identify key predictive metabolic markers in cancers.

Mol Cancer Res. 2023:21(7) | 3 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-06)

Ranking

All databases:
4610/6895 (33.154%)
Health and medicine:
1171/1738 (32.681%)
Literature:
399/577 (31.023%)
Metadata:
475/719 (34.075%)
4610
Total Rank
3
Citations
1.5
z-index

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Record metadata

Created on: 2023-03-21
Curated by:
Yanling Sun [2025-09-17]
Yanling Sun [2023-03-23]
Dong Zou [2023-03-21]
Yanling Sun [2023-03-21]