Michał J. Markuszewski

Metabolomika - nowy trend w badaniach medyczno-farmaceutycznych
2006-01-01

Metabolomics - a new trend in medical and pharmaceutical research. Upon entering a post genome sequencing era, the development of new analytical technologies for DNA, mRNA, protein, and metabolite based analyses is urgently needed. As an analogy to genomics and proteomics, metabolomics is a comprehensive, qualitative and quantitative analysis of all metabolites present in biological samples, particularly saliva, urine, and blood plasma. The metabolome is defined as the complete set of all low molecular weight, non-peptide biomolecules synthesized by a given biological system, such as organism, organ, tissue, cell or cell compartment. Since metabolites are the final products of cellular regulatory processes, their quantitative levels can be regarded as the ultimate response of biological systems to genetic and environmental changes. The number of different metabolites in the human is unknown, estimates range from a low of 2000-3000 to a high of around 20000. In the proposed review article, several analytical techniques applied to metabolomics will be characterized with particular emphasis put on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectroscopy (MS). The most recent developments in applications of metabolomic data to various studies related to the genome and proteome area will also be discussed.