What is Omics

Due to the recent advent of highly parallel assays, it is now possible to monitor the behavior of not just one or a couple of variables but rather tens of thousands of variables at once. A growing number of disciplines with the ‘-omics’ suffix like genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and so on, intend to describe and understand completely a given level.

Refers to high-throughput technology or assays that measure all the same molecules simultaneously from a biological sample providing a holistic view of the biological system. For example, genomics profile DNA, transcriptomics measure transcripts, proteomics and metabolomics quantify proteins and metabolites, respectively.

A useful concept in biology which informally annotates a field of study ending in ‘-omics’. Omics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of pools of biological molecules that translate into the structure, dynamics and function, of an organism. Accordingly ‘genomics’ deals with the entirety of an organism's hereditary information coded in its DNA (also called genome); ‘transcriptomics’ deals with the entirety of RNA transcribed from the DNA (transcriptome), ‘proteomics’ deals with the entirety of proteins translated from the mRNA (proteome) and ‘epigenomics’ addresses factors and mechanisms affecting the accessibility of genomic information by modifications of its structure, e.g. via DNA-methylation or chemical modifications of the histones serving as DNA-packing proteins (epigenome). Historically, the first ‘omics’ term used was ‘genome’ created in 1920 by the botanist H. Winkler as a blend of the words ‘gene’ and ‘chromosome’ to annotate the chromosome set as the material foundations of an organism. In the last years one observes however an inflation of ‘omics’-terms often used simply to annotate any field of study.