OMICS Sciences: toward omics personalized medicine

Abstract

The omics sciences of systems biology including genomics, transcriptomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, and pro-teomics, aim at understanding the biological mechanisms that give rise to the phenotype of an organism by using high-throughput technologies with the promise of great medical advances. The importance of all these sciences is that all, with the exception of genomics are context dependent. Genome is constant in time and place in each cell of an organism, but the entire complement of messenger RNA molecules, proteins and metabolites in a cell, tissue, organ or organism varies with physiological, pathological or developmental conditions (Keusch 2006). The term "omics" represents the study of biological processes as systems. It deciphers the dynamic interactions between the numerous components of a biological system to analyse networks, pathways, and interactive rela-tions that exist among them, such as genes, transcripts, proteins, metabolites, and cells. This new scientific vision has opened the way to new research strategies and experimental technologies that have transformed the study of virtually all life processes. Expansion of the "–ome" concept was incessant and has created a host of new terms, including bacteriome, cardiome, epigenome, erythrome, immunome, microbiome, neurome, connectome, osteome, physiome, proteinome, transportome, degradome, psychome, transcriptome, and many others. In the present review, these concepts are briefly introduced with a major focus towards proteomics.