Livestock metabolomics – A overview

Metabolomics is the study of small, low molecular weight cellular metabolites that are the end products of metabolism. Metabolomics reflects the downstream of gene expression and very closer to the phenotype of animals than proteomics or genomics. In addition to gene expression, post- transcriptional and posttranslational modification regulate metabolic activities of living creatures. The potential advantage of metabolomic information add metabolomic data to SNP-based genomic prediction approaches integrated with conventional phenotypic data in genomic selection programs. This integration would be useful if the prediction accuracy was limited by the small number of phenotyped animals in the training populations. Metabolome include metabolite profiling, metabolic fingerprinting and metabonomics are the principle approaches for analyzing metabololites of biological system. The traits like disease resistance are unmeasurable require challenge study. The advancements in metabolomics research producing potential biomarkers but most of the identified biomarkers have failed to replace existing clinical tests. Potential biomarker should be confirmed and validated using hundreds of specimens and should be reproducible with high specificity and sensitivity. The metabolomics has contributed substantially to our understanding of different diseases and the development of metabolome analysis will helpful for the discovery of novel biomarkers for early detection of various diseases and improving production and reproduction traits of livestock and poultry.