Shin-MassBank was mentioned in a paper published on the metabolome database MassBank

On Nov 11, 2025, a paper on the metabolome database "MassBank" was published in the Database Issue of the scientific journal "Nucleic Acids Research." The paper mentioned the Shin-MassBank project, which is being undertaken by Professor Fumio Matsuda of Osaka University, who is a co-author of this paper.

MassBank, constructed with the support from BIRD, the predecessor project of NBDC, was launched in Japan in 2006 as an open-source, open-access mass spectral library, and has been operated with the support of The Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan (MSSJ). In 2011, a dedicated MassBank server was launched in Europe with the support of The NORMAN Association in Germany. Spectra for environmentally relevant compounds were added, and MassBank now provides spectra for 18,529 compounds, totaling 119,845 mass spectral data entries, submitted by researchers worldwide. MassBank also interconnects with multiple resources, including MassBank of North America, Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking, PubChem, the US EPA CompTox Dashboard, the NORMAN Database System, and RforMassSpectrometry, making it an international metabolomic mass spectral library widely used by researchers worldwide. This paper describes the 20-year history of MassBank and the metabolomic mass spectral data in it, and also mentions Shin-MassBank project, in which Professor Matsuda and his colleagues are working to further expand MassBank's data.

Shin-MassBank project consists of the raw data repository MB-POST, MassBank Human, a library of product ion (MS2) spectra obtained from human metabolome datasets, and MassBank in silico, which provides metabolite annotation functions using in silico data. The project aims to develop an innovative data processing pipeline for the accumulation of MS2 spectra obtained from biological samples into MassBank. The Shin-MassBank project is a member of the MassBank Consortium, and works in collaboration with the Spectral Data Division of The Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan (MSSJ).

Shin-MassBank project is being carried out as part of Database Integration Coordination Program (DICP) "Development of next generation mass spectra data base, Shin-MassBank" (Principal Investigator: Fumio Matsuda, Professor, Osaka University).

(Fig. 1) MassBank consortium