ABSTRACT
Pregnancy is a physiological state that demands intricate and timely hormonal, immunological, metabolic, and physiological adaptations of multiple interconnected molecular and cellular systems. This chapter reviews some examples of the applications of the omics in research of the main complications of pregnancy, and we conclude with some comments and conclusions. Transcriptomics techniques are used to describe the global messenger RNA expression of a particular tissue, providing information on how genes are regulated yielding information about which cellular processes are active and which are dormant. One clear example of the potential of proteomics in the main obstetrical syndromes is preterm birth. The two most common analytical tools used for metabolomics have been nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Spectral data can be analyzed using multivariate analysis methods, which analyze all metabolomics features simultaneously and identify relationships between them.
