ABSTRACT
Almost two decades ago, a true scientific revolution began, with the determination of the first complete genome sequence of a living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae (Fleischmann et al., 1995). Shortly after, the scientific community entered the so called “postgenomics era”, when the first DNA microarrays were used to simultaneously measure the expression of virtually all the genes of an organism (Chee et al., 1996; De Risi et al., 1997; Lashkari et al., 1997; Lockart et al., 1996; Schena et al., 1995; Shalon et al., 1996). Genomics and transcriptomics studies led to an explosion in the amount of biological data. Soon, proteomics and metabolomics, the study of the whole set of proteins (Proteome) and low molecular weight biomoleculesmetabolites (Metabolome) followed. The suffix-ome has since been used in several words to designate the whole, genome-wide study of something (Table 15.1). All ‘omics’ methods consist of high-throughput, data-driven, holistic approaches with the objective of understanding the cellular processes as a whole. This is the main objective of systems biology, an academic discipline that aims at a systems-level understanding of biological organisms (Kitano, 2002).
