METABOLATOR

METABOLATOR is a curve fitting and analysis software to determine physical key parameters that describe the metabolism of microorganisms. It allows the user to interactively evaluate metabolic heat flow curves recorded by isothermal microcalorimetry (IMC). It is the first open source analysis tool for the IMC data from microbial cultures and is based on the recent introduction of an extended calorimetric Monod equation. It provides fitting parameters including standard errors and R² values as an overall "goodness of fit" measure.

The software automates otherwise tedious manual work. Users can upload their own tabular datasets for analysis and tweak the intervals and offsets of the fitting procedure using the intuitive user interface. Additionally, heuristics help narrowing down the fitting region and starting point of the algorithm. The fitting results are shown as a report on screen and can be downloaded in a tabular format. Moreover, interactive plots allow the user to explore input data and the fitting results in the original time domain of the raw data as well as in the enthalpy-dependent presentation on which the algorithm is built.

METABOLATOR has the potential to improve data management practices by unifying data exchange formats in the biological IMC community. The software supports IMC users in environmental, biomedical, and pharmacological research world-wide. Due to the clear documentation and previously published mathematical background, the software will also promote the currently very limited quantitative comparability of data from different labs.

For maximum ease of use, we offer the service free of charge at https://metabolator.hzdr.de.