Culturomics: A New Kid on the Block of OMICS to Enable Personalized Medicine

Abstract

This innovation analysis highlights the underestimated and versatile potential of the new field of culturomics and examines its relation to other OMICS system sciences such as infectiomics, metabolomics, phenomics, and pharmacomicrobiomics. The advent of molecular biology, followed by the emergence of various disciplines of the genomics, and most importantly metagenomics, brought about the sharp decline of conventional microbiology methods. Emergence of culturomics has a natural synergy with therapeutic and clinical genomic approaches so as to realize personalized medicine. Notably, the concept of culturomics expands on that of phenomics and allows a reintroduction of the culture-based phenotypic characterization into the 21st century research repertoire, bolstered by robust technology for automated and massive execution, but its potential is largely unappreciated at present; the few available references show unenthusiastic pursuit and in narrow applications. This has not to be so: depending on the specific brand of culturomics, the scope of applications may extend to medicine, agriculture, environmental sciences, pharmacomicrobiomics, and biotechnology innovation. Moreover, culturomics may produce Big Data. This calls for a new generation of data scientists and innovative ways of harnessing and valorizing Big Data beyond classical genomics. Much more detailed and objective classification and identification of microbiota may soon be at hand through culturomics, thus enabling precision diagnosis toward truly personalized medicine. Culturomics may both widen the scope of microbiology and improve its contributions to diagnostics and personalized medicine, characterizing microbes and determining their associations with health and disease dynamics.

Molecular Basis of Pathogenesis of Coronaviruses: A Comparative Genomics Approach to Planetary Health to Prevent Zoonotic Outbreaks in the 21st Century

“…After profiling of a pathogenic organism through multiomics strategies, a key challenge that awaits is to devise mechanisms in controlling the growth of zoonotic pathogen either through therapeutic strategies or by manipulations of their culturing conditions. Electroculturomics, a study of the effect of electric modulation on microbial growth and life cycle, holds a promising future in treating human diseases when combined with probiotics, pharmaceuticals, and various nutraceutical elements (Kambouris et al, 2018).…”

Efficient engineered probiotics using synthetic biology approaches: A review

“…Synthetic biology is the trending field, which uses genetic components library. This is helpful in faster analyses of virulence and other factors by using next‐generation sequencing, recombinant studies, and computational tools . This is also beneficial for broadening the strength of probiotics by genetic engineering of microbes, which focuses on gene product and the system of advantageous genes.…”

‘Omics Technologies

“…Meta'omics techniques such as metagenomics or metatranscriptomics do not focus on studying biological molecules of one organism rather of a community of organisms from, e.g., an environmental sample. Novel technologies developed around studying microorganisms have also led to many neologisms that include the term 'omics, such as culturomics (Kambouris et al 2018), but do not reflect the original meaning of the terminology and are sometimes misleading due to ambiguity arising from overlaps with other areas of sciences.…”