ChEBI-N - Enrichment Analysis with the ChEBI Ontology

Authors

Carlsson, M., Gehrke, B., Tumescheit, C., Rutz, A., Malik, A., O'Boyle, N. M., Zamboni, N., Hastings, J.

Abstract

Introduction: Biological and chemical ontologies are structured representations that can be used to map entities such as metabolites onto broader chemical and biological categories. Enrichment analysis applied to such ontologies identifies classes whose representation within a set deviates from an expected background distribution, helping to interpret complex metabolomics measurements. Objectives: This study aimed to develop a tool for ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) ontology-based enrichment analysis, named ChEBI-N (ChEBI eNrichment). It is a successor of the previous tool BiNChE, with new features that broaden its applicability. Methods: We reimplemented BiNChE and extended it to accept SMILES or InChI strings as well as ChEBI IDs. These broaden applicability to datasets with entities that are not yet present in ChEBI. We also constructed organism-specific background populations. Results: We demonstrate the tool on three published metabolomics datasets covering wine, cheese, and human plasma samples. ChEBI-N correctly highlighted relevant enriched classes in all three datasets, such as flavonoids in the wine dataset and fatty acid classes in the cheese dataset. Comparing organism-specific and full-ChEBI backgrounds shows that restricted backgrounds reduce the inflated significance of generic classes, although the most enriched classes remain largely consistent. Conclusion: ChEBI-N is an extended successor to BiNChE for ontology-based enrichment analysis of metabolomics data, offering a hypothesis-generating complement to existing metabolomics analysis pipelines. Availability: ChEBI-N is freely available at chebin.hastingslab.org or as a Python package (pypi.org/project/chebin), with source code at github.com/ontology-tools/chebin, archived at Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23264219) and Software Heritage (swh:1:rev:133a41792704eb7f1db746f36a5ae97e9247b2b7).

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 21 Oct 2026.

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