title: 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.
authors.affiliation: 1 The Golden Helix Foundation , London, United Kingdom .|2 Department of Oenology and Beverage Technology, School of Food Technology, Higher Technological Educational Institute , Athens, Greece .
authors.forename: Manousos E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Kambouris
authors.affiliation: 1 The Golden Helix Foundation , London, United Kingdom .
authors.forename: Cristiana
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pavlidis
authors.affiliation: 3 Department of Pharmacy, School of Health Sciences, University of Patras , Patras, Greece .
authors.forename: Efthymios
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Skoufas
authors.affiliation: 4 Department of Microbiology, School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens , Athens Greece .
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Arabatzis
authors.affiliation: 5 Department of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens , Athens, Greece .
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kantzanou
authors.affiliation: 4 Department of Microbiology, School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens , Athens Greece .
authors.forename: Aristea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Velegraki
authors.affiliation: 3 Department of Pharmacy, School of Health Sciences, University of Patras , Patras, Greece .|6 Department of Pathology, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University , Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates .
authors.forename: George P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Patrinos
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D055432:Metabolomics / Q000379:methods; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods; D064307:Microbiota / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000502:physiology*; D057285:Precision Medicine / Q000379:methods*; D040901:Proteomics / Q000379:methods
keywords: big data; culturomics; microbiology; personalized medicine; phenomics