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Metabolomics (2016) 12:148 DOI 10.1007/s11306-016-1108-4
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11306-016-1108-4&domain=pdf
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Web End = REVIEW ARTICLE
The metabolome 18 years on: a concept comes of age
Douglas B. Kell1,2,3 Stephen G. Oliver4,5
Received: 17 August 2016 / Accepted: 17 August 2016 The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
AbstractBackground The term metabolome was introduced to the scientic literature in September 1998.
Aim and key scientic concepts of the review To mark its 18-year-old coming of age, two of the co-authors of that paper review the genesis of metabolomics, whence it has come and where it may be going.
Keywords Metabolome Functional genomics Systems
biology Precision medicine
1 Introduction
The great advances in biology leading up to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the denition of the genetic code (Cobb 2015; Judson 1979), and the tremendous strides made
since then, have been mainly pioneered by molecular genetic studies on model organisms such as Escherichia coli and yeasts (Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe) (Castrillo and Oliver 2004). The genius of molecular genetics lay in the design of experiments whereby fundamental theories of the workings of living cells at the molecular level could be rigorously tested by performing experiments that had a qualitative read-out (either the cells grew or they did not; either colonies were blue or they were not). This was set to change when the rst chromosome sequence to be completed (that of S. cerevisiae chromosome III; Oliver et al. 1992) revealed that only about 20 % of the protein-encoding genes had previously been discovered by classical genetics augmented by recombinant DNA technology. It was immediately evident that the normal course of genetic research, which proceeds from mutant phenotypes to the denition of the corresponding genotype, had to be reversed. Since DNA sequencing would dene all the genes, in the future we would need to move from gene to function, rather than from function to gene (Kell and Oliver 2004) (Fig. 1). This functional analysis would need to be conducted using techniques that were every bit as comprehensive as genome sequencing, and so the different levels of omic analysis were conceived (Oliver 1996).
Transcriptomics (the analysis of the complete complement of (m)RNA molecules in a cell, tissue, or organ)...