Metabolomics technology development

NIH Guide. Metabolomics Technology Development.htm, Request for Application-RM-04-002. http //www.nih.gov [accessed August 3,2007]. 

Application of Genomic, Proteomic, and Metabolomic Technologies to the Development of Countermeasures against Chemical Warfare Agents... 

Advances in science often come as a result of advances in technology, and this has been especially tme in the fields of genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. The development of microarrays, advancements in MS and NMR instmmentation, and computing power to analyze large multivariate data sets have provided scientists with unprecedented ability to measure biological response at the... 

Liu, X., Ser, Z., Locasale, J.W. (2014) Development and Quantitative Evaluation of a High-resolution Metabolomics Technology. Anal. Chem. 86 2175-2184. 

Thus there is sufficient ground to cover at the functional level even after successful genetic characterizations that justifies the development of technologies for functional genomics, especially for high-throughput monitoring of proteomes and metabolomes. 

Technologies that examine a large number of metabolites at the same time are sometimes known as metabolomics. This term is similar to genomics, in which large numbers of genes are detected or studied simultaneously. Such studies are only in their beginning phases, and researchers do not yet understand if the differences they are finding in metabolites are critical or not. Dopamine and other brain chemicals are important in the development of schizophrenia, at least for some forms of the disease, but scientists do not yet know how. 

Relative to GC-MS, the application of LC-MS within the metabolomics held is still at a preliminary stage. Reproducibility is a major concern, and true quantification can be hindered by ion suppression effects whereby one co-eluting metabolite affects the ionization of another (26). The lack of electrospray ionization mass spectral libraries also makes identification by LC-MS a particularly challenging problem. Nevertheless, the technique is developing fast and has benefited from several technological advancements such as the acquisition of accurate mass data by the use of ion cyclotron resonance Fourier transform MS (26). 

These new omics technologies will also enable us to efficiently identify novel compounds of value to both the Agrochemical and Pharmaceutical industries. It is of crucial importance that the data that results from high throughput analyses of the genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome of crop plants and foeir relatives is archived in an appropriately structured and indexed manner. This will enable it to be fully integrated and data-mined over an extensive period as our ability to formulate increasingly sophisticated queries on these data sets develops. 

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