Metabolomic network analysis of estrogen-stimulated MCF-7 cells: a comparison of overrepresentation analysis, quantitative enrichment analysis and pathway analysis versus metabolite network analysis

In the context of the Human Toxome project, mass spectroscopy-based metabolomics characterization of estrogen-stimulated MCF-7 cells was studied in order to support the untargeted deduction of pathways of toxicity. A targeted and untargeted approach using overrepresentation analysis (ORA), quantitative enrichment analysis (QEA) and pathway analysis (PA) and a metabolite network approach were compared. Any untargeted approach necessarily has some noise in the data owing to artifacts, outliers and misidentified metabolites. Depending on the chemical analytical choices (sample extraction, chromatography, instrument and settings, etc.), only a partial representation of all metabolites will be achieved, biased by both the analytical methods and the database used to identify the metabolites. Here, we show on the one hand that using a data analysis approach based exclusively on pathway annotations has the potential to miss much that is of interest and, in the case of misidentified metabolites, can produce perturbed pathways that are statistically significant yet uninformative for the biological sample at hand. On the other hand, a targeted approach, by narrowing its focus and minimizing (but not eliminating) misidentifications, renders the likelihood of a spurious pathway much smaller, but the limited number of metabolites also makes statistical significance harder to achieve. To avoid an analysis dependent on pathways, we built a de novo network using all metabolites that were different at 24 h with and without estrogen with a p value