CAT Bridge: an efficient toolkit for compound-transcript association mining from multi-omics data

With advancements in sequencing and mass spectrometry technologies, multi-omics data can now be easily acquired for understanding complex biological systems. Nevertheless, substantial challenges remain in determining the association between gene-metabolite pairs due to the complexity of cellular networks. Here, we introduce Compounds and Transcripts Bridge (abbreviated as CAT Bridge, freely available at http://catbridge.work), a user-friendly platform for longitudinal multi-omics analysis to efficiently identify transcripts associated with metabolites using time-series omics data. To evaluate the association of gene-metabolite pairs, CAT Bridge is the first pioneering work benchmarking a set of statistical methods spanning causality estimation and correlation coefficient calculation for multi-omics analysis. Additionally, CAT Bridge featured an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to assist users interpreting the association results. We applied CAT Bridge to self-generated (chili pepper) and public (human) time-series transcriptome and metabolome datasets. CAT Bridge successfully identified genes involved in the biosynthesis of capsaicin in Capsicum chinense. Furthermore, case study results showed that the convergent cross mapping (CCM) method outperforms traditional approaches in longitudinal multi-omics analyses. CAT Bridge simplifies access to various established methods for longitudinal multi-omics analysis, and enables researchers to swiftly identify associated gene-metabolite pairs for further validation. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.