The mission of the Earth Metabolome Initiative is to reveal and safeguard the life-sustaining chemistry of all known species on Earth, map its patterns and functions, and make this knowledge open.

The largely unexplored metabolic diversity of life on Earth, which orchestrates living systems and supports human health and nutrition, is disappearing rapidly as species go extinct. The Earth Metabolome Initiative aims to launch an unprecedented collaborative global sampling and digitization effort to reveal and preserve this vital natural resource. We will develop resources and technologies to accelerate global metabolome discovery for the benefit of human societies and protection of biodiversity. We will make our findings open, accessible and interoperable within an electronic resource that will connect metabolites with their roles in living systems, functional networks and importance for human societies. This will constitute an Earth Metabolome Knowledge Base for sustainable innovations now and in future. We will thus achieve the following scientific, societal and environmental aims:

1. Advance life sciences by systematically expanding knowledge on global chemodiversity and placing it in the context of biosphere processes and functions.

2. Benefit human society through the development of novel, sustainable solutions in agriculture, medicine and other fields. 3. Protect biodiversity by providing critical information for monitoring, developing novel metrics, and informing predictive tools to prioritize protection and incentivising conservation.

The Digital Botanical Gardens Initiative (https://www.dbgi.org/) has been designed as a pilot for the EMI. 

This is the RIO topical collection gathering the research outcomes of the Earth Metabolome Initiative, feel free to propose your ideas and contribute!