Good Ome(n)s?
A short note to keep you updated on the latest biological "-omes".
As we all now know, "-ome" and "-omic" mania kicked off with the genome, a neologism which today describes the complete DNA sequence of an organism. The term itself, however, was coined as early as 1920 by German botanist Hans Winkler as a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. The genome was soon followed by the transcriptome (a term for all RNAs encoded by the genome) and the proteome (the translated and modified protein products of these transcripts).
Then things snowballed. Nearly every field with a family of more than a handful of members suddenly evolved its own "-ome", spawning classifications that often whiffed of creative rebranding and imaginative grant-proposal writing. Readily available examples that litter biology today include the kinome, lipidome, glycome, interactome, the splicome up to the cellome, fluxome or even the CHOme. Indeed, see a comprehensive list of more than hundred biological "-omes" and "-omics" for yourself at
http://www.genomicglossaries.com/content/omes.asp.
Yet even this list is out of date. Not yet included is for example the allosterome, which has been proposed only recently by Janet Lindsley and Jared Rutter in their article "Whence cometh the allosterome" (PNAS 103: 10533-5). Their argument is that "... allosteric regulation is underappreciated in the systems biology world and (...) many allosteric effectors remain to be discovered." Therefore, logically, all allosteric regulator molecules of a cell define the "allosterome".
Already included in the list, though still only provisionally, is the "methylome", comprising the complete set of DNA methylation modifications of a cell. However, this field can already be regarded as established as a landmark experimental paper appeared just this week in Cell: "Genome-wide High-Resolution Mapping and Functional Analysis of DNA Methylation in Arabidopsis" (Cell 126: 1189-1201). A comment in the same issue praises it as "The First High-resolution DNA 'Methylome'" (Cell 126: 1025-1028).
So it seems that there is still no end in sight for the multiplication of "-omes and -omics". However, not everybody is happy with these recent developments. For example, after explaining genomics and proteomics, a scientific author states in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia: "Researchers have proposed other less well-established "omes" which have not won universal acceptance within biology as a whole. The feasibility of a systematic enumeration of entities like these seems far less clear (unlike in the case of genomics or even proteomics), and such enumeration may not help in providing biological insight."
A blogger named "RPM" reacted even more drastically to the methylome-paper on his weblog "evolgen" (
http://scienceblogs.com/evolgen) in a post entitled "Yet Another '-ome'". "We can thank Andrew Feinberg for introducing the term methylome, which he defines as 'a neologism that describes the complete set of DNA methylation modifications of a cell'. Check out this definition of neologism: 'A meaningless word used by a psychotic.' Exactly. Enough with the -ome already."
It seems as if more and more researchers are getting cheesed off with their "collegue-omes".
Ralf Neumann
