Metabolomics – The Combination of Analytical Biochemistry, Biology, and Informatics

The combination of analytical biochemistry to measure the metabolic complement with sophisticated informatics, bioinformatics, and statistics makes up the newest of the ‘omics fields called metabolomics. Metabolites are characterized by a diverse chemistry and therefore require the application of numerous analytical approaches for their extraction, separation, detection, and quantification. In the past decade, the technologies have improved substantially allowing the analysis of thousands of compounds simultaneously. However, this has led to the current bottleneck in metabolomics that is how to extract information from raw data of many different analytical platforms and the subsequent appropriate analysis in a biological context. Before any statistical analysis can be performed on the resulting high-density data sets, a number of preprocessing steps including peak finding, integration, filtering, normalization, and transformation are required. In this article, we aim to summarize the state of the art of metabolomics technologies from both an analytical and a bioinformatics point of view. We present the challenges currently faced by metabolomics researchers and provide the readers with potential approaches to address those challenges.