MESA or Metabolite Set Enrichment Analysis refers to a concept to identify biologically meaningful patterns in metabolite concentration changes for quantitative metabolomic studies. This name is inspired by the well-established Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA).
In MetaboAnalyst, there are three statistical methods available for MSEA (as shown in the Fig below)
The above approaches are available in the Enrichment Analysis module for targeted metabolomics data. MetaboAnalyst also offers similar approaches for untargeted metabolomics data. Please refer to the Functional Analysis module if you have LC-MS peak list data
Thank you for your answer about this topic. By the way, one thing that I would like to know is related to input data for Enrichment Analysis and Functional Analysis. If I have a normalized LC-MS peak list data, thus I should use the Functional Analysis intead of Enrichment analysis to do metabolomics enrichment analysis. I am trying to evaluate the enrichment based on specific metabolites to compare mutant with the reference. Sorry for this basic question, but I am a little bit confuse about the concentration and peak list since they measure the quantity of certain metabolite in a sample. Thus, I am trying to undertand if I can use peak table into enrichment analysis on MetaboAnalyst.
