What makes metabolomics such a promising technology?
Metabolomics is the study of the small-molecule metabolite profile of a biological organism, with the metabolome representing the collection of all metabolites. What is so exciting about metabolomics is that the metabolome is the very end product not only of the genetic setup of an organism, but also of the sum of all influences it is exposed to, such as nutrition, environmental factors, or treatments. Even though genomics has successfully identified associations between the genetic setup and specific diseases, the biologic mechanisms through which gene variations influence disease development and severity are often not fully understood. Research therefore turned to studying the transcriptome—the total set of RNA transcripts in a given organism. Transcriptomics, or expression profiling, assesses the expression level of RNAs in a cell population and provides information on the relative amounts of RNA. However, RNA levels are not directly proportional to the expression level of the prote
