Reproductive biology in the “omics” era: what can be done?

ABSTRACT

The term “omics” have been widely used in science nowadays. The current nomenclature of “omics” sciences includes genomics for DNA, transcriptomics for mRNA, proteomics for proteins, lipidomics for lipids, metabolomics for intermediate products of metabolism and more recently interactome for the whole set of molecular interactions in cells. All these “omics” are encompasses in the high-dimensional biology approach (HDB), which refers to the simultaneous study of the different biological levels of an organ, tissue or an organism. HDB fundamental premise is that the complexity of biological systems renders them difficult to comprehensively understand using only a reductionist approach, studying just units of the whole. The integration of “omic” techniques can be called Systems Biology and it aim is to define the interrelationships of several or, if possible, all the elements in a biological system. The HDB and System Biology have been used widely for biomarker discover in several diseases, once they allow for a global description of changes in biological systems and do not require a specific hypothesis. Unfortunately despite the fact that achieves HDB studies is not so difficult nowadays, the use of this approach together with systems biology is rare in the reproductive biology field. The main goal of this review is to introduce the reader to the HDB and mass spectrometry and how they could benefit the reproductive biology field.