Multi-omics strategies

Extending the central dogma of life (Crick 1970), a Systems ecology aspect includes the integration of all biomolecules including metabolites alongside DNA, RNA and Proteins. This is primarily to emphasise the holistic approach to addressing several aspects of a community, via metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, and meta-metabolomics. It must be noted that the terminology meta is used as a suffix to represent the microbial components of the community.

Do we need multi-omics?

A question often raised is the utility of multi-omic approaches and it is important to understand that, like in classical science, it is the question and/or the hypothesis that drives the utility of the available methodology. Though metabarcoding efficiently profiles the biodiversity of a microbial community, metagenomes help elucidate functions.

Metatranscriptomes further highlight what is expressed, i.e. genes, under certain conditions, while the metaproteome can provide relative abundances of key enzymes. The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Systems ecology, involves which (by)products of metabolism are found in a community, on which light is shed through meta-metabolome approaches.

The figure below (Figure 4) summarises the utility of each ‘ome’, enabling one to make the necessary informed choices (Daliri et al. 2021). Therefore, to identify the needs of the research questions to be addressed, it may be useful to keep the following in perspective:

Proceed to the next page to identify pros and cons of adapting multi-omics strategies in your research.