Abstract

Metabolomics is based on the simultaneous analysis of multiple low-molecular-weight metabolites from a given sample. The goals of metabolomics are to catalog and quantify the myriad small molecules found in biological fluids under different conditions. The metabolomics represents the collection of all metabolites in a biological organism, and metabolic profiling can give an instantaneous ‘snapshot’ of the physiology of that cell. Together with the other more established omics technologies, metabolomics will strengthen its claim to contribute to the detailed understanding of the in vivo function of gene products, biochemical analysis, regulatory networks and more ambitious, the mathematical description and simulation of the whole cell in the systems biology approach. This phenomenon will allow the construction of designer organisms for process application using biotransformation and fermentative approaches making effective use of single enzymes, whole microbial and even higher cells and allows the connection of data from genomics, proteomics to enables coordinating the timing of the analysis to physiologically important windows.

Keywords: Metabolomics, genomics, proteomics, high throughput screening, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, liquid chromatography