"Omic" studies on Neglected Tropical Diseases: A new Special Issue from Journal of Proteomics
19 September 2011
Although malaria does not fall under the categorization of a Neglected Tropical Disease, this Special Issue will be of great interest to the Malaria Nexus Research community.
The emergence of “omic” technologies, like genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics or metabolomics, have revolutionized biological research. Advances in instrumentation and methodologies have fueled an expansion of the scope of biological studies from simple biochemical analysis involving few molecules at a time to the systematic study of whole genomes, transcriptomes, and proteomes. Technological breakthroughs allow simultaneous examination of thousands of genes, transcripts, proteins, and metabolites with high-throughput techniques and analytical tools to extract information. Hence, “omic” approaches to comprehensively describe biological systems will undoubtedly have a major impact on our understanding of biological diversity, including the gene expression profiles and the phenotypes of both normal and diseased organisms. The papers published in this Special Issue of Journal of Proteomics devoted to Neglected Tropical Diseases represent a significant, though not exhaustive, sample of the application of “omic” technologies (mainly proteomics) to the study of NTDs.