Metabolomics and Food Science: Concepts and Serviceability in Plant Foods and Nutrition

Metabolomics (or metabonomics) is considered one of the recent “omics,” joining genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics as a science employed toward the understanding of systems biology (Schmidt 2004). Although there is some overlap in terminology with metabolomics and metabonomics, for simplicity, the term metabolomics is preferred and is de›ned as a “measurement of time-related multiparametric metabolic responses of biological systems to a physiological or environmental stimulus or genetic modi›cation” (Nicholson et al. 1999).