[2][3][4] The database is maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the development is funded by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

[5][6] As of July 2018, the MetaboLights browse functionality consists of 383 studies, two analytical platforms, NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry.

The metabolite structure data is linked to chemical databases, including ChemSpider, PubChem, and ChEBI.

MetaboLights consists of two components: The data stored in MetaboLights is available for download from an FTP site and can be reused by the scientific community, where data sharing is considered an integral part of the scientific method.

[9] Submitted studies are automatically assigned a stable unique accession number (e.g. MTBLS1) that can be used as a publication reference; MetaboLights is one of the repositories recommended by several scientific journals, including EMBO Journal[10] and Nature's Scientific Data.