ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to provide a broad vision of what are volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the reasons of their interest in biological matrices, and their use in the study of the VOCs produced by all living organisms, the volatilomics. We provide a list of the last review for the period 2016–2017, focusing on biomedical applications as well as sampling techniques and state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation used for those applications. We specially focus on human volatilomics and its use with metabolomics techniques, and their relation with systems biology and precision medicine. Finally, as volatilomics generates large and diverse sets of analytical data, it has significant challenges, mainly in standardization and metadata reporting, which are described in detail.
