-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:

biome: ecologically similar communities of plants defined by climate and geography
genome: organism's entire hereditary information encoded in DNA
metabolome: metabolites
transcriptome: Transcriptions
proteome: proteins
interactome: interactions between proteins
mechanome: biomechanical systems
textome: text corpus for biological information