Key Sectors and Applications
Environmental and Occupational Exposure Assessment
Metabolomics can provide important biochemical information to better assess biological effects related to environmental stressors. Metabolomic biomarkers are useful indicators of environmental and occupational exposure and effects.
Agriculture, Biofluels and Bioengineering
Metabolomics is increasingly utilised in the agricultural sector. Characterization of plant metabolomes can provide important information regarding plant response and adaptation to environmental stressors including heat, freezing, drought, and salinity. This may help farmers to increase crop production and enhance nutritional value and quality of crops. This is also the case for biofuels and various bioengineering applications.
Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology
Pharmaceutical companies have increasingly utilised metabolomics in drug discovery, pre-clinical studies and clinical trials. Metabolomics has particularly been important assessing pharmacodynamics and drug toxicity during early development stages. Metabolomics is inherently dynamic and therefore may provide a real-time "snapshot" of physiological status in pre-clinical studies and clinical trials.
Nutrition, Health and Wellness
In addition to other "Omics" techniques (genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics), metabolomics is increasingly being utilised for a range of diet and nutrition applications. This includes using metabolomic profiling to assess the role of the gut microbiome and the physiological response to a particular dietary regime, nutraceutical or dietary supplement.
Sports and Personalized Medicine
Precision Medicine is an emerging medical treatment model involving individually tailoring treatment based on characteristics of each patient. Genomics and proteomics have been the primary "Omics" approaches used for precision medicine. Metabolomics will undoubtedly play an important role in this novel medical treatment approach. Sports medicine practitioners can also utilize metabolomic profiling to monitor energy utilisation and metabolism, fatigue response and recovery of individual athletes.
Early Disease Detection and Precision Medicine
Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the thousands of small molecules, the metabolome, may provide important information regarding mechanisms of disease and elicit novel diagnostic biomarkers for early disease detection. In addition to profiling key metabolic biomarkers in a patients biofluids (e.g. urine, plasma), characterising the metabolome of individual's gut microbiome is increasingly playing a role in assessing various diseases and conditions.