Metabolomics is crucial for understanding diseases and searching for potential biomarkers. By measuring metabolomics changes due to various factors—environment, lifestyle, diseases and treatments, for example—researchers can reveal insights into specific cellular processes. This understanding informs the onset and progression of diseases such as diabetes and cancer, facilitating patient stratification and precision medicine.
The number and type of small molecules that make up the metabolome for any given biological system are vast and complex. The metabolism of any organism is constantly changing, using and producing various molecules for an extremely wide diversity of cellular processes. The incredible number and diversity of small molecule metabolites involved in these reactions makes metabolomics studies enormously challenging.
