RUBY GEHLAUT, S.YADAV<\/p>\n
ABSTRACT
Metabolomics is a newborn cousin to genomics and proteomics. Specifically, metabolomics involves the rapid, high throughput characterization of the small molecule metabolites found in an organism. As it is the scientific study of chemical processes involving metabolites and is the “systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind”, the study of their small-molecule metabolite profiles. Since the metabolome is closely tied to the genotype of an organism, its physiology and its environment (what the organism eats or breathes), metabolomics offers a unique opportunity to look at genotype-phenotype as well as genotype-envirotype relationships. Metabolomics is increasingly being used in a variety of health applications including pharmacology, pre-clinical drug trials, toxicology, transplant monitoring, newborn screening and clinical chemistry. This approach has many advantages for studying organism\u00e2\u20ac\u201cenvironment interactions and for assessing organism function and health at the molecular level.\u00a0 However, a key limitation to metabolomics is the fact that the human metabolome is not at all well characterized. Metabolomics has its roots in early metabolite profiling studies but is now a rapidly expanding area of scientific research in its own right. Metabolomics (metabonomics) has been labelled one of the new \u00e2\u20ac\u0153omics\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, joining genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics as a science employed toward the understanding of global<\/span> systems biology. Metabolomics, when used as a translational research tool, can provide<\/span> a link between the laboratory and clinic, particularly because metabolic<\/span> and molecular imaging technologies, such as positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging, enable the discrimination
of metabolic markers noninvasively in vivo. These interactions can be studied from individuals<\/span> to populations, which can be related<\/span> to the traditional fields of ecophysiology and ecology, and from instantaneous<\/span> effects to those over evolutionary time scales<\/span>, the latter<\/span> enabling studies of genetic adaptation.
KEYWORDS- Metabolomics, metabonomics, transcriptomics, biomarkers<\/span>, metabolites<\/p>\n