More -omics

Genomeweb Daily News has a short -omics story

describing the 2-year-old project as one that will “have more immediate impact on medicine and medical practices than the Human Genome Project,” the University of Alberta said researchers have catalogued “2,500 metabolites, 1,200 drugs, and 3,500 food components that can be found in the human body.”

Here is the the Human Metabolome Database by Genome Alberta that reports slightly different figures on the intro page (attn HMDB is not identical to the Human Mitochondrial Database!)

The database is designed to contain or link three kinds of data: 1) chemical data, 2) clinical data, and 3) molecular biology/biochemistry data. The database currently contains more than 2100 metabolite entries including both water-soluble and lipid soluble metabolites as well as metabolites that would be regarded as either abundant (>1 mM) or relatively rare (<1 nM). Additionally, approximately 5500 protein (and DNA) sequences are linked to these metabolite entries.

The NAR Jan issue has the accompanying paper:

Metabolomics is a newly emerging field of ‘omics’ research concerned with the high-throughput identification, quantification and characterization of the small molecule metabolites in the metabolome.