Reading the metabolic fine print

Barely a decade has passed since the term metabolomics—the systemic analysis of the chemical ‘fingerprints’ of specific cellular processes—made its debut in the scientific literature (Oliver et al , 1998), but its application in medicine goes back to the Middle Ages, when doctors used to diagnose diseases by the colour and smell of the patient's urine. However, modern‐day metabolomics started in the late 1960s with the development of chromatographic separation techniques that allowed the detection and analysis of various compounds in complex mixtures. The first publication that described the use of these techniques appeared in the early 1970s and analysed the content of urine and breath (Pauling et al , 1971).> …the big question remains whether metabolomics has the necessary predictive power to become a tool for clinical use, in particular, in personalized medicineMetabolomics is a powerful diagnostic tool that provides a snapshot of an organism's metabolic state through the systemic analysis of its metabolites. Any deviations from the normal range indicate possible pathological aberrations; yet, the big question remains whether metabolomics has the necessary predictive power to become a tool for clinical use, in particular, in personalized medicine.The main point is that an organism's metabolome—its full and unique cocktail of metabolites—changes in response to stimuli and environmental conditions. This is in contrast to its genome, representing the organism's sum total of genes, and its transcriptome, which is the varying range of messenger RNA molecules expressed by those genes in each cell type. Except when mutations occur, both the genome and transcriptome are fixed for life.It is this strong interaction between the metabolome and the environment that unites the various definitions of metabolomics. It also includes a definition of the sister term metabonomics, which describes the complete metabolic state of an organism, and was coined by one of …