Metabolomics - An Exciting New Field Within the "OMICS" Sciences

Metabolomics is a newly emerging Science which can be seen as an advanced, specialized form of Analytical Biochemistry. This technology is centered around the detection of small molecules and, by definition, excludes the organic biopolymers such as proteins and fatty acids. Important small metabolites include amino and other organic acids, sugars, volatile metabolites and most of the diverse secondary metabolites found in plants such as alkaloids, phenolic components and coloured metabolites such as carotenoids and anthocyanins. Key to any metabolomics approach is the aim to gain the broadest overview possible of the biochemical composition of complex biological samples in just one or a small number of analyses. Liquid or gas chromatography (LC or GC) are usually used to separate the individual components in complex organic extracts after which Mass Spectrometry (MS) is employed to detect the metabolites present. Alternatively, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) may be used. Characteristic of this technology is the large scale nature of the analyses performed - involving not only the semi-automated production of a large amount of complex data per analysis but also performing these analyses sequentially on large numbers of samples. Highly complex data matrices are obtained - often of many Gigabytes. Consequently, metabolomics analyses can only be performed when all the necessary computing and bioinformatics tools are in place to allow automated data storage and efficient non-labour intensive data analysis. Metabolomics is usually used either for 'fingerprinting' samples to perform comparative analyses to detect differences of for 'profiling' where individual differential metabolites are identified for further analysis.