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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Jun 14.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2012 Mar 22;13(4):263–269. doi: 10.1038/nrm3314

Figure 1. The central dogma of biology and the ‘omic’ cascade.

Figure 1

While genes and proteins are subject to regulatory epigenetic processes and post-translational modifications respectively, metabolites represent downstream biochemical end products that are closer to the phenotype. Alterations in a single gene (illustrated by blue dots) or a single protein can lead to a cascade of metabolite alterations. In the theoretical schematic shown, up- and down-regulated metabolites are shown in red and unaltered metabolites are shown in grey. Untargeted metabolomics aims at comprehensively profiling metabolites without bias to identify changes that correlate with cellular function or phenotype. By performing meta-analysis, metabolic alterations shared between multiple animal models or multiple genetic modifications may be identified as shown by the superimposed Venn diagram.