FAIR by design: study design-driven creation of standards compliant metadata

To ensure that the PrecisionTox generated (meta)data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) [1] at source and remains discoverable, a principled approach has been developed to bootstrap metadata management. It takes advantage of a consolidated experimental design with unambiguous declaration of experimental variables, and the availability of software component engineered to exploit such information. This approach provides a programmatic way to generate standard-compliant metadata records, which appropriately and meaningfully track the experimental information and the related variables, such as species (5 organisms spanning large evolutionary distances), exposures (made with 250 chemicals), dose levels and time points post exposure. This standard-compliant collection of metadata records also ease of deposition to established public repositories for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and Mass Spectrometry (MS)-based metabolomics. Ongoing work will integrate metadata records with robotic platforms used in sample handling, data acquisition pathways, and deposition to recommended data archives.