MADByTE is a tool built for community development of NMR metabolomics, and that can be complicated.
There are a lot of factors that had to be considered for the development of MADByTE and other NMR metabolomics platforms - sample complexity, pulse sequence selection, peak picking, and automation of processing -just to name a few. Many of these small ‘huh…wish I knew that’ issues are worth discussion and I hope to provide a place to chat about them in the context of MADByTE’s development and usage.
There are already some wonderful tools and blogs out there, namely Stan’s NMR Blog and Glen Facey’s University of Ottawa NMR Blog, both of which have helped me figure out what the heck I’ve messed up and how I can improve it. There are other places to learn out there as well, such as The Resonance, which is a great example of Bruker’s outreach to learning and improving NMR as a research tool. When I can, I’ll post about a problem, how I solved it, and where I found the information from.
One truth I’ve learned though this process is just how much the community cares about developing new ideas, and how willing they tend to be in developing them into usable tools. People who - I thought I had no business talking to yet - have taken the time at conferences to discuss some of the challenges and be candid about the limitations they see. These problems are hard, and the willingness to share strategies have helped to catapult this project into fruition, and for that I’m eternally grateful.