Biology has become a data-rich subject with genome-scale occuring in all fields. Ever since the rise of genomics, the suffix – ‘omics’ has been added to the names of many fields to denote studies undertaken on a large or genome-wide scale.
A useful concept in biology which informally annotates a field of study ending in ‘-omics’. Omics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of pools of biological molecules that translate into the structure, dynamics and function, of an organism. Accordingly ‘genomics’ deals with the entirety of an organism’s hereditary information coded in its DNA (also called genome); ‘transcriptomics’ deals with the entirety of RNA transcribed from the DNA (transcriptome), ‘proteomics’ deals with the entirety of proteins translated from the mRNA (proteome) and ‘epigenomics’ addresses factors and mechanisms affecting the accessibility of genomic information by modifications of its structure, e.g. via DNA-methylation or chemical modifications of the histones serving as DNA-packing proteins (epigenome). Historically, the first ‘omics’ term used was ‘genome’ created in 1920 by the botanist H. Winkler as a blend of the words ‘gene’ and ‘chromosome’ to annotate the chromosome set as the material foundations of an organism. In the last years one observes however an inflation of ‘omics’-terms often used simply to annotate any field of study.
Image retrieved from: Wu RD et al. JDR 2011; 90:561-572.
Objective of OMICS study
Omics is a general term for a broad discipline of science and engineering for analyzing the interactions of biological information objects in various ‘omes’. The main focus is on
- Mapping information objects such as genes, proteins, and ligands
- Finding interaction relationships among the objects
- Engineering the networks and objects to understand and manipulate the regulatory mechanisms; and
- Integrating various omes and omics subfields.
OMICS Fields
There are five major types of high-throughput measurements that are commonly performed:
- Genomic: analysis of the DNA sequence (i.e., SNP).
- Transcriptomic: analysis of transcribed RNA (i.e., the simultaneous measurement of gene expression values in a cell or tissue type).
- Proteomic: determination of proteins present in a sample.
- Metabolomic: identification and quantification of all metabolites in a sample.
- miRNAomics: regulatory mechanisms underlying control of transcription.