The explosion of high-throughput analytical technologies, like DNA-microarray tests, NMR or LC-MS, have enabled the emergence of the so-called omic sciences. Depending on the considered biological level, four main omics fields can be distinguished: genomics (DNA), transcriptomics (mRNA), proteomics (proteins) and metabolomics (metabolites). These different omic levels are strongly related:
In the past years, our main efforts have been focused on the development and adaptation of chemometric methods able to deal with metabolomic datasets studying the effects of environmental stressors in different model organisms (cell cultures, rice, yeast, daphnia, zebrafish). These metabolomic studies have been conducted using a variety of analytical platforms such as NMR, LC-MS, GC-MS or MSI. The importance of the application of chemometric approaches and tools is a critical aspect at different points of the metabolomic workflow:
Further work is intended in the fusion of information coming from various metabolomic platforms (i.e. NMR and LC-MS) or different omic levels (i.e. metabolomic and transcriptomic data obtained by RNAseq).
