Other types of “-omics”

Once the word "genomics" became widely used, other related terms were then coined using the "-omics" suffix. Here are a few of the commoner ones, along with their basic definitions.

 

Structural genomics: the determination of genome structure at the sequence level

Functional genomics: determining the function of many genes simultaneously

Proteomics: the large-scale analysis of an organism's proteins

Transcriptomics: targets many (as many as tens of thousands in microarrays) different mRNA molecules simultaneously to monitor patterns of gene expression

Metabolomics: targets the population of small-molecule metabolites characteristic of cellular processes