mzTab-M Documentation Hub

mzTab-M is the HUPO-PSI community standard for reporting mass spectrometry-based small molecule metabolomics and lipidomics results. It is designed to be compact, human-readable, and machine-parseable, enabling straightforward integration with downstream analysis pipelines and data repositories.

Highlights

Semantically enriched

All identifiers, units, and controlled vocabulary terms are referenced via ontology entries from PSI-MS, ChEBI, and other community ontologies.

Typed and structured

Mandatory and optional fields are formally typed. The JSON schema and specification define every allowed value unambiguously.

Validation profiles

Results can be validated against tiered validation profiles that reflect the level of identification confidence, from feature-only through summary-level reporting.

AI-ready

Structured, ontology-anchored metadata makes mzTab-M files suitable for automated processing and integration into AI/ML pipelines without additional curation.

MetaboLights submission

mzTab-M can be used to create full local submissions in ISA-Tab and MAF format for MetaboLights, the EMBL-EBI repository for metabolomics experiments, using the mztabm2mtbls library.

Cite

When you use mzTab-M 2.1 in your work, please cite:

TBD

When you use mzTab-M 2.0 in your work, please cite:

Nils Hoffmann, Joel Rein, Timo Sachsenberg, Jürgen Hartler, Kenneth Haug, Gerhard Mayer, Oliver Alka, Saravanan Dayalan, Jake T. M. Pearce, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Da Qi, Martin Eisenacher, Yasset Perez-Riverol, Juan Antonio Vizcaíno, Reza M. Salek, Steffen Neumann, and Andrew R. Jones mzTab-M: A Data Standard for Sharing Quantitative Results in Mass Spectrometry Metabolomics. Analytical Chemistry 2019, 91 (5), 3302–3310. DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.8b04310 | PubMed PMID: 30688441