# West Coast Metabolomics Center for Compound Identification

> **NIH NIH U2C** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS · 2020 · $157,500

## Abstract

Project Summary – Overall
West Coast Metabolomics Center for Compound Identification (WCMC)
The West Coast Metabolomics Center for Compound Identification (WCMC) is committed to the overall goals of
the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics Initiative and specifically aims to largely improve small molecule
identifications. Understanding metabolism is important to gain insight into biochemical processes and relevant
to battle diseases such as cancer, obesity and diabetes. Compound identification in metabolomics is still a
daunting task with many unknown compounds and false positive identifications. The major goal of the WCMC is
therefore to develop processes and resources that accelerate and improve the accuracy of the compound
identification workflow for experts and medical professionals. The WCMC for Compound Identification is
structured in three different entities: the Administrative Core, the Computational Core and the Experimental Core.
The Center is led by the Director Prof. Fiehn in close collaboration with quantum chemistry experts Prof. Wang
and Prof. Tantillo, and metabolomics experts Dr. Barupal and Dr. Kind with broad support from mass
spectrometry, computational metabolomics and programming experts. The Administrative Core will assist the
Computational and Experimental Core to develop and validate large in-silico mass spectral libraries, retention
time prediction models and innovative methods for constraining and ranking lists of isomers in an integrated
process of cheminformatics tools and databases. The developed tools and databases will be made available to
all Common Fund Metabolomics Consortium (CF-MC) members and professional working groups. The WCMC
will also provide guidance for compound identification to the National Metabolomics Data Repository. The broad
dissemination of developed compound identification protocols, training for compound identification workflows,
databases and distribution of internal reference standard kits for metabolomic standardization will overall widely
support the metabolomics community.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10258317
- **Project number:** 3U2CES030158-03S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
- **Principal Investigator:** Oliver Fiehn
- **Activity code:** U2C (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $157,500
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2018-09-11 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10258317

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10258317, West Coast Metabolomics Center for Compound Identification (3U2CES030158-03S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10258317. Licensed CC0.

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