Systems Biology has recently emerged as the integrated approach to study biological systems–intracellular networks, cells, organs and any biological entity–by measuring and integrating genetic, proteomic and metabolic data. In this context, metabolomics involves the comparative, non-targeted, holistic (simply measure ‘everything’) analysis of the complete set of metabolites in a biological systems. The key issue in metabolomics is the translation of the differences in the metabolomes into differences in the biological functioning of a cell, organism or complete systems.

In this presentation the TNO technology platform for the comprehensive analysis of the metabolites using GC-MS and LC-MS will be discussed. The importance of data-preprocessing and multi-variate analysis will be explained. This platform has been successfully applied for the identification of bottlenecks in the microbial production and for finding system descriptors for the development of diseases. Finally, current analytical challenges and the future perspective of metabolomics will be discussed.