REQUIMTE, Laboratory of Toxicology, Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Pharmacy, Porto University, Portugal.
Curr Med Chem. 2013;20(2):257-71. doi: 10.2174/092986713804806621.
Over the last decades there has been a change in biomedical research with the search for single genes, transcripts, proteins, or metabolites being substituted by the coverage of the entire genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome with the "omics" approaches. The emergence of metabolomics, defined as the comprehensive analysis of all metabolites in a system, is still recent compared to other "omics" fields, but its particular features and the improvement of both analytical techniques and pattern recognition methods has contributed greatly to its increasingly use. The feasibility of metabolomics for biomarker discovery is supported by the assumption that metabolites are important players in biological systems and that diseases cause disruption of biochemical pathways, which are not new concepts. In fact, metabolomics, meaning the parallel assessment of multiple metabolites, has been shown to have benefits in various clinical areas. Compared to classical diagnostic approaches and conventional clinical biomarkers, metabolomics offers potential advantages in sensitivity and specificity. Despite its potential, metabolomics still retains several intrinsic limitations which have a great impact on its widespread implementation - these limitations in biological and experimental measurements. This review will provide an insight to the characteristics, strengths, limitations, and recent advances in metabolomics, always keeping in mind its potential application in clinical/ health areas as a biomarker discovery tool.
在过去的几十年中，生物医学研究发生了变化，从寻找单个基因、转录本、蛋白质或代谢物，转变为通过“组学”方法涵盖整个基因组、转录组、蛋白质组和代谢组。与其他“组学”领域相比，代谢组学的出现相对较晚，其定义为系统中所有代谢物的综合分析，但它的特殊特征以及分析技术和模式识别方法的改进，极大地促进了其应用的日益普及。代谢组学在生物标志物发现方面的可行性基于这样一种假设，即代谢物是生物系统中的重要参与者，疾病会导致生化途径的中断，这并不是新概念。事实上，代谢组学，即对多种代谢物的平行评估，已被证明在各种临床领域具有优势。与经典的诊断方法和常规的临床生物标志物相比，代谢组学在灵敏度和特异性方面具有潜在优势。尽管具有潜力，但代谢组学仍然存在一些内在的局限性，这些局限性对其广泛应用具有重大影响，这些局限性存在于生物学和实验测量中。本文将深入探讨代谢组学的特点、优势、局限性和最新进展，始终牢记其作为生物标志物发现工具在临床/健康领域的潜在应用。
