Metabolomics
Several Michigan Center for Translational Pathology researchers are dedicated to examining metabolic disease. The underlying causes of diseases based on the body’s metabolism are still relatively unknown. Understanding the molecular basis of these diseases, which include cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, may lead investigators to new preventive measures and treatments.
Metabolomics is the study of the small molecule biochemistry of an organism. The goal of metabolomics is to understand the metabolic state of a subject by extracting, identifying, and quantifying all of the small molecule compounds (e.g. metabolites) in a biological sample. It is the systematic study of the unique chemical traces that certain cellular processes leave behind, specifically, the study of their small-molecule metabolite profiles. The metabolome represents the collection of all metabolites in a biological organism, which are the end products of its gene expression. Thus, while messenger-RNA gene expression data and proteomic analyses do not tell the entire story of what is happening in a cell, metabolic profiling provides an instantaneous snapshot of the physiology of that cell. One of the challenges of systems biology is to integrate proteomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic information to give a more complete picture of living organisms.
