Scientists have used a wealth of proteomic, genomic, and molecular data from humans to create an interactive, online tool that maps some of the complexities of human physiology and disease. This visual tool is called Connecting Omics (COmics), and it can be used to make queries about different traits and diseases. The researchers based this method on blood, urine, and saliva samples from almost 400 people. The findings have been reported in Nature Communications.
Physiological processes involve a wide range of interactions between different molecules including DNA, RNA, and proteins. These relationships can depend on what type of cell, tissue, or organ is considered. This study focused on twelve years of data from diabetes patients and healthy individuals of different ethnicities, so while it will only capture some of the diversity and aspects of human biology and illness, it does demonstrate how technology can be used to test hypotheses about human disease.
“Our idea was to bring together everything we have learned over more than a decade of multiomics research to create a comprehensive molecular model of the human body and its processes,” said senior study author Dr. Karsten Suhre, a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar (WCM-Q), among other appointments. “This reference tool is free to access and use by researchers who want to investigate how the human body works at the molecular level and also for the formation of hypotheses to test with experimentation.”
The blood, urine and saliva samples that were collected from healthy people and those with diabetes were analyzed in a variety of ways. This included gene expression analyses, epigenetic studies, proteomics techniques that assessed proteins, and metabolomic assays that focused on molecules like amino acids, fats, and sugars. The study looked at over 6,000 molecular data points.
This work revealed different pathways and links between genetic features and proteins, metabolic characteristics, and molecular dysfunction. The data was integrated into the Connecting Omics (COmics) website to map the molecular human.
This so-called multiomics approach is being used with increasing frequency, and aims to consider biological processes together rather than focusing on individual features, to reveal more about health, disease, and potential treatments.
“Our integrative omics approach provides an overview of the interrelationships between different molecular traits and their association with a person's phenotype—their observable traits, such as their physical appearance, biochemical processes and behaviors,” said first study author Dr. Anna Halama, an assistant professor at WCM-Q. "The scale of the data integrated within the COmics web tool enables access to hundreds of thousands of pathways and associations for researchers to explore, giving huge potential for discovery and investigation.
Sources: Weill Cornell Medicine, Nature Communications
