© Society for Experimental Biology 2005
Preface
The last 20 years have seen changes in the way biochemists look at metabolism. If we are to understand how a cell works it is now quite clear that there must be a move away from just studying a single pathway by grinding up whole plants. Metabolism is a network of interrelated pathways. What happens in one pathway affects others, and different cells in the same tissue can be at different steady-states. The rapid advances in biology have provided vast amounts of genome and proteome information which can be used to understand metabolism. Alongside this there have been rapid advances in analytical tools. The latest generation of mass spectrometers and nuclear magnetic resonance machines now allow exp-eriments which, even a decade ago, would have been too labour-intensive to be practical. Metabolomics is the term that has been coined to cover this new generation of experiments. However, understanding requires a combination of data acquisition, involving the most appropriate analytical tools, and a means of interpreting it. Therefore metabolic studies require the appropriate mix of biochemists, analytical chemists, and mathematicians.
With this in mind a session called Making sense of the metabolome was organized as part of the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Meeting held at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh between 29 March and 2 April 2004. The theme for the session was to start with the analytical tools, examine a few cases where they had been applied, and discuss means to analyse the data. There were over 40 paper and poster presentations. We deliberately did not restrict ourselves solely to botanical topics since we felt scientists would benefit from a wider discussion. Thus there were presentations which covered the problems faced by the analyst in deciding what procedure to adopt and how to identify unknowns, results of analysing primary and secondary metabolism, mathematical approaches to sorting the data out and identifying how the cell controls the accumulation of metabolites. From this, nine of the invited speakers have written articles for this special issue which cover the range of issues discussed at the meeting.
We would like to thank the generous support of the Journal of Experimental Botany for the meeting and making this publication possible as well as the generous support provided by Thermo Electron Corporation, Waters, and the BBSRC. We would also like to thank Thermo Electron and Waters for their assistance at the workshop associated with the sessions to discuss the more practical aspects of measuring metabolism.
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