Phenomics

Phenomics is an area of biology concerned with the measurement of phenomes — the physical and biochemical traits of organisms — as they change in response to genetic mutation and environmental influences. It is used in functional genomics, pharmaceutical research and metabolic engineering.

An important field of research today is trying to improve, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the capacity to measure phenomes. This include developing high-throughput measurement systems. For example, the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility, an initiative of the Australian government, has developed a number of new instruments for comprehensive and fast measurements of phenotypes in both the lab and the field.

RNA interference may be used to generate large numbers of random mutations in organisms such as nematode worms. The resulting phenotypes of the creatures are then analysed. The large volumes of data generated by such work may be stored in specialised databases.

Selected publications

Highly cited publications concerning phenomics include:

• Schilling, C.H.; Edwards, J.S.; Palsson, B.O. (1999), "Toward metabolic phenomics: analysis of genomic data using flux balances", Biotechnology Progress 15 (3): 288–295, doi:10.1021/bp9900357 
• Gerlai, R. (2002), "Phenomics: fiction or the future?", Trends in Neurosciences 25 (10): 506–509, doi:10.1016/S0166-2236(02)02250-6 
• Freimer, N.; Sabatti, C. (2003), "The human phenome project", Nature Genetics (Nature Publishing Group) 34 (1): 15–21, doi:10.1038/ng0503-15 
• Warringer, J.; Ericson, E.; Fernandez, L.; Nerman, O.; Blomberg, A. (2003), "High-resolution yeast phenomics resolves different physiological features in the saline response", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100 (26): 15724–15729, doi:10.1073/pnas.2435976100 
• Zbuk, K.M.; Eng, C. (2006), "Cancer phenomics: RET and PTEN as illustrative models", Nature Reviews Cancer 7 (1): 35–45, doi:10.1038/nrc2037 
• Eberius, M.; Lima-Guerra, J. (2009), "High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping – Data Acquisition, Transformation, and Analysis", Bioinformatics 7 (1): 259–278, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-92738-1_13 

Further reading

• Houle, D.; Govindaraju, D.R.; Omholt, S. (2010), "Phenomics: the next challenge", Nature Reviews Genetics 11 (12): 855–66, doi:10.1038/nrg2897 

See also

• PhenomicDB, a database combining phenotypic and genetic data from several species.

External links

• The Laboratory of Neurophenomics
• Semel Institute: Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics
• The Australian Plant Phenomics Facility