Phenomics

Phenomics is an area of biology concerned with the measurement of phenomes — the physical and biochemical traits of organisms — as they change in response to genetic mutation and environmental influences. It is used in functional genomics, pharmaceutical research, metabolic engineering and increasingly in phylogenetics.^[1]

An important field of research today is trying to improve, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the capacity to measure phenomes. This include developing high-throughput measurement systems. For example, the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility, an initiative of the Australian government, has developed a number of new instruments for comprehensive and fast measurements of phenotypes in both the lab and the field.

Selected publications

Highly cited publications concerning phenomics^[2] include:

• Schilling, C.H.; Edwards, J.S.; Palsson, B.O. (1999), "Toward metabolic phenomics: analysis of genomic data using flux balances", Biotechnology Progress 15 (3): 288–295, doi:10.1021/bp9900357, PMID 10356245 
• Gerlai, R. (2002), "Phenomics: fiction or the future?", Trends in Neurosciences 25 (10): 506–509, doi:10.1016/S0166-2236(02)02250-6, PMID 12220878 
• Freimer, N.; Sabatti, C. (2003), "The human phenome project", Nature Genetics (Nature Publishing Group) 34 (1): 15–21, doi:10.1038/ng0503-15, PMID 12721547 
• Warringer, J.; Ericson, E.; Fernandez, L.; Nerman, O.; Blomberg, A. (2003), "High-resolution yeast phenomics resolves different physiological features in the saline response", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100 (26): 15724–15729, doi:10.1073/pnas.2435976100, PMC 307635, PMID 14676322 
• Zbuk, K.M.; Eng, C. (2006), "Cancer phenomics: RET and PTEN as illustrative models", Nature Reviews Cancer 7 (1): 35–45, doi:10.1038/nrc2037, PMID 17167516 
• Eberius, M.; Lima-Guerra, J. (2009), "High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping – Data Acquisition, Transformation, and Analysis", Bioinformatics 7 (1): 259–278, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-92738-1_13, ISBN 978-0-387-92737-4 
• O'Leary, M. A.; Kaufman, S. (2011), "MorphoBank: phylophenomics in the ‘‘cloud’’", Cladistics (27): 1–9, doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2011.00355.x 

Further reading

• Houle, D.; Govindaraju, D.R.; Omholt, S. (2010), "Phenomics: the next challenge", Nature Reviews Genetics 11 (12): 855–66, doi:10.1038/nrg2897, PMID 21085204 

See also

• PhenomicDB, a database combining phenotypic and genetic data from several species
• Phenotype microarray

References