Tutorials
Video tutorials
The database contains tutorial information about the methodologies for the metabolomics studies developed by the consortium. These methodologies reflect metabolomics utility in functional genomics and the current state of the technology. Metabolomics is not yet a widely utilized technology and it is thus important to train researchers in the methodologies, technologies, and standards in metabolite profiling. This ensures laboratory-to-laboratory reproducibility and facilitates meta-analyses across multiple experiments. Three video tutorials provide insight into the methods used for tissue harvesting and distribution. The experimental metadata describes in detail the process used for harvesting tissue material and Tissue Harvestvideo tutorial provides a visual guide for this process. This tutorial details the process used to open Petri dishes containing sample material, to collect the tissue and to immediately halt metabolism by submerging the tissue in liquid nitrogen. This process is completed within less than 2 minutes as seen by the elapsed time on the timer. Each laboratory requires specific amounts of tissue for each analytical platform. Collected samples must be weighed and sorted for shipment to the analytical laboratories. The two video tutorials Sample weighing and Sorting of tissue samples and Sample Weighing (Closer View) provide a visualization of this process. The three video tutorials provide an experimentalist with an additional tool to understand and repeat the process used to generate tissue samples required for metabolomics experiments.
Help pages
The web portal also provides tutorials on how to browse, download and visualize the already available data.
These tutorials are provided as help buttons 
on all the main function pages as well as under the main Tutorials menu option. These tutorials are provided with many examples and screen shots of resulting pages so users know what to expect when
they select each option.