Nielsen Jens, Oliver Stephen
Center for Microbial Biotechnology, BioCentrum-DTU, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
Trends Biotechnol. 2005 Nov;23(11):544-6. doi: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2005.08.005. Epub 2005 Sep 12.
The metabolome of a cell represents the amplification and integration of signals from other functional genomic levels, such as the transcriptome and the proteome. Although this makes metabolomics a useful tool for the high-throughput analysis of phenotypes, the lack of a direct connection to the genome makes it difficult to interpret metabolomic data. Nevertheless, functional genomics has produced examples of the use of metabolomics to elucidate the phenotypes of otherwise silent mutations. Despite several successes, we believe that future metabolomic studies must focus on the accurate measurement of the concentrations of unambiguously identified metabolites. The research community must develop databases of metabolite concentrations in cells that are grown in several well-defined conditions if metabolomic data are to be integrated meaningfully with data from the other levels of functional-genomic analysis and to make a significant contribution to systems biology.
细胞的代谢组代表了来自其他功能基因组水平（如转录组和蛋白质组）的信号放大与整合。尽管这使得代谢组学成为高通量分析表型的有用工具，但由于与基因组缺乏直接联系，代谢组学数据难以解读。然而，功能基因组学已提供了利用代谢组学阐明隐性突变表型的实例。尽管取得了一些成功，但我们认为未来的代谢组学研究必须聚焦于准确测量明确鉴定出的代谢物浓度。如果要将代谢组学数据与其他功能基因组分析水平的数据进行有意义的整合，并对系统生物学做出重大贡献，科学界必须建立在多种明确界定条件下培养的细胞中代谢物浓度的数据库。
