The -Omics Tool Box
Résumé
The-omics tool box refers to a set of modern analytical techniques developed during the past decades that paved way for a remarkable progress of knowledge in biology, biochemistry, and life sciences. The aim of these new technologies is to acquire - ideally - complete sets of molecular data of the genome, proteome, transcriptome, metabolome, and related fields. The suffix "-ome" refers to the entirety of, for example, genes, proteins, or metabolites in a regarded system while "-omics" corresponds to the related analytical methods for acquiring global qualitative and quantitative information. Thus terms like genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and metallomics were coined. These "-omics" technologies have the ambitious aim to integrate genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome data in order to expand our knowledge on organisms or ecological systems. Such integration and interpretation of large datasets improve the understanding of pathway functions and regulatory networks. An example from plant biology in Figure 18.1 demonstrates how functional interactions in a network among genes, proteins, and metabolites can be elucidated by an integrated "-omics" approach. This chapter presents the basics of modern genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and metallomics techniques. This includes large-scale high-throughput experiments, computational, and theoretical approaches in order to advance the frontier of knowledge on biological systems. © 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. All rights reserved.