Lipidomics Joins The Omics Evolution

摘要

The end of the 20th century was marked by the genomics revolution, and one might say that the beginning of the 21 st century is marked by efforts to bring our knowledge of a cell's proteins, known as proteomics, to a par with our growing knowledge of a cell's transcripts, known as transcriptom-ics. Many of us believe that the next evolution of the omics revolution will be to map all of the metabolites of a cell, known as metabolomics. Leading the way in these efforts is the work in many laboratories on one subset of the metabolome, the lipidome, aimed at mapping all of the lipids of a cell, known as lipidomics (1-4). The ultimate goal is to evolve an integrated omics picture (the "interactome") of the genes, transcripts, proteins, and metabolites to fully describe cellular functioning. One leading effort in the lipidomics evolution is described in this issue of PNAS (5).