BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Jumping into the metabonome

June 18, 2001 7:00 AM UTC

The main problem in understanding the functional genomics of a disease is the huge scope of biochemical changes that occur when one particular protein is altered. Bioinformatics on the genome (genomics) and the proteome (proteomics) are widely used, but whole-organism data on metabolites (metabonomics) has been more elusive. Nevertheless, the value of metabonomic information has been thoroughly validated, as certain metabolites are already widely used as clinical biomarkers, including creatinine, uric acid, cholesterol and glucose.

Last week, Gene Logic Inc. expanded on its core of gene expression databases by investing in Metabometrix Ltd. (London, U.K.), a startup that has developed an NMR method for metabolic profiling. While NMR is not the most sensitive biophysical technique, when combined with pattern recognition technology the approach offers a high throughput method for generating a database of metabolic profiles for understanding disease and the effects of pharmacologic agents...