-ome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The English suffix -ome is commonly attached to biological entities for describing very large-scale data collection and analysis. It is supposed to mean a 'body'. It is used mostly to denote a whole set of something. For example genome is used to indicate the whole set (whether it is complete now or not) of genes in a cell, tissue, organ, organism, or species (possibly even more).
Other uses:
- metabolome: metabolites
- proteome: proteins
- interactome: interactions between proteins
- connectome: connections between brain cells
- mechanome: biomechanical systems
See -omics for more.
