METABOLATOR: Establishing a Citable Web Application for Automated Metabolic Load Analysis

METABOLATOR is a web application for automated analysis of microcalorimetric metabolic data using Monod's equation. The software was developed in collaboration between the Institute of Resource Ecology and the Department of Information Services and Computing at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf (HZDR), and is now offered as a web service for the community. In addition to publishing the software under an open source license, we made the service, which is hosted on HZDR infrastructure, citable by registering its metadata with DataCite and minting a dedicated Digital Object Identifier (DOI). In this talk, we will present the results of our collaboration from the point of view of a Research Software Engineer (RSE). We will introduce the METABOLATOR software, and discuss its development from initial trials into an installable package and web service. Moreover, we will debate the importance of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for reproducible, citable, and overall FAIR data analysis workflows.